I'd like to explicitly make a point (your description seems to hint at it) that star ratings also indicate something orthogonal to liking stuff, something like segmentation of types of content.

Let's use a food analogy - I may go to a very fancy restaurant with exquisite food, and see that it holds up to its standards and is quite okay, and deserving all its stars. And in comparison I may have a basic hotdog or a sloppy burger, and admit that it's really nothing special, the fancy stuff was better, and that hotdog deserves less stars.... but at the same time that definitely does not mean that I always prefer the fancy stuff, and I can reasonably want that hotdog right now.

So that's the same with movie star ratings. I can at the same time agree that I liked movie A much better than movie B (and rank them accordingly), and I might re-watch movie A the fourth time and wouldn't bother with movie B ever... and at the same time not be in the mood for a complex movie like A, and want a simple, cheap, stupid movie similar to B, but with more explosions.

It's clear that 1 star sucks, but "5-star movies" and "4-star movies" perhaps simply indicate different genres of something roughly like "fancy" and "non-fancy" movies; and a fancy movie that's not really good doesn't get 4 stars but much worse; much like in the food analogy if the fancy restaurant serves something comparable in quality to that basic hotdog, it's not getting the same rating as the hot dog stand but much worse because of the unmet expectations.