Honestly I think we just need some big name to advocate for STAR (or any cardinal system). IRV really took off after CGP Grey's video and gained WAY more support after Hasan Minhaj's episode. The only places I see people talking about cardinal systems are Hacker News and the Yang subreddit (though lots of armchair experts advocating for condorcet methods because they don't see criteria other than VSE as being important). I would not expect cardinal methods to enter the public discourse until some famous person talks about it.