what is the maximum damages that a judge would award if replit won this case? $1k? Maybe? 

IMNAL, but with trade secrete theft I imagine the damages awarded could be whatever the other side is able to convince was the harm done. E.g. "... defendant open-sourced our trade secretes, which was forked by competitors, causing irreparable harm ... seeking $15MM in damages ... and legal fees, etc.."

Yeah, with 37 visitors in a month? You need an incredibly corrupt justice system to make that work.

It's not the visitors they are going to bring up in the court. The angle they push will probably be something along the lines of: the intern stole our intellectual property and put them out there on GitHub. There is no way we can put the cat back in the bag. As a result of this disclosure, we are suffering a financial loss of 100s of millions of dollars. Even if his website has 0 visitors, now thousands of people have access to our intellectual property and they collectively have a lot of visitors.

I mean, it's not like Anthony Levandowski put millions of self-driving cars in the streets and took business away from Waymo's self-driving cars. Just by copying Google's intellectual property, not even publishing it for the whole world to see, he committed an offence that cost 18 months in prison and more than 100 million dollars in fines.

Of course, this lawsuit may not have gotten that far, as it seems quite baseless. But it would have taken years of mental turmoil and hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal fees for that to be established. And that is if the threat of the unfavourable outcome did not cause another tragedy like Aaron Swartz's.

In a working justice system the judge takes one look at all that and dismisses the case, then fines them for a frivolous waste of the court’s time.

Well, then I guess US and Canada's justice systems are non-working. Because that's not what will happen in practice. Also, there is a lot of legal work that needs to get done even before getting in front of a judge, and those can cost 100 ks on their own.

As far as I read the news and if it is true, then indeed I believe the US system is quite broken. Seems geared towards screwing over and bullying the poor.

Right, the “cat our of the bag” argument. Also similar to the ones used in the Napster, Torrent, eMule file-sharing persecutions whereby any forgettable film shared would instantly tally as a lost sale for each-and-every participant to the platform. :/

A guy making 30k a year got a reduced judgement of 2 million dollars against him for distributing copies of Nintendo Switch games on the basis that each download was a lost sale.

Only issue? The Nintendo Switch can't play copies of a game unless you painstakingly modify it.

So every person who visited his site had already decided not to purchase games and exploited gaps in Nintendo's DRM on their personal devices, yet our justice saw fit to permanently ruin him with the incredibly nonsensical argument Nintendo presented.

Our justice system is broken in more ways than are apparent.

That's copyright. Claiming 100k in damages from copyright infringement is not hard under US law.

If there was trade secret - then there's no minimum, it's all however much a lawyer can convince the judge that the company is loosing.