I learnt this when I uploaded a project that claimed to do something but was only like 10% finished and you couldn’t run it.

It got cross-posted across the internet and a ton of stars and even referenced in some else’s project repo as a competitor/alternative and reasons why theirs was better!

This experience really made me smile. Nobody even tried to run it.

FWIW, stars on Github aren't means of expressing that you've tested and liked something; they're means of bookmarking interesting repos. So it's entirely plausible you got hundreds of stars and nobody ever run the project. Myself, I've stared close to 300 repos, and have run maybe a handful.

When I've interviewed developers, I will look at their profile if they include it in their resume, but only give it a cursory look, to maybe ask some high level questions in the interview. If I had a lot of time to do in-depth code reviews of projects that aren't my job, we wouldn't be needing to hire :-)

I got an internship at a big company simply because my project was in line with a project of theirs. Instead of being contacted by a recruiter it was an actual developer!

It's uncommon (and my anecdote is part of the "exceptions" for sure), but it's very very motivating when it happens.

I like to think of it as Linkedin for coders.