From my perspective and how I judge it, yes.
If I was investigating some password solution in Go and gloss over a gopass project with 1k stars I would certainly investigate it.
If another project only has two stars it would get investigated later in case gopass doesn't meet my requirements.
That is not the only metric I use but it is a first pass. I don't think anyone has time to analyze every project out there to see if they're good or not.
It's a little like how people filter out some CVs based on X attribute.
Which is unfair and it isn't the perfect metric but when the volume is too big you gotta have a first filter.
Obviously if someone in my network highly recommend a CV, or, in this case, a Golang pass tool, I would investigate it first
However, it doesn't tell you how interested someone is in your project--only that they're interested enough to click a button on their mouse. Moreover, it doesn't even tell you much about how interesting your project is; it doesn't tell you what portion of your GH page's visitors thought it was sufficiently interesting to click the button. They might well get another 1K from this HN article; does that mean their project became twice as interesting today?