Maybe it's like the YouTube Like and Subscribe, except for the part where they contact you for new releases. It's a lot less pushy to tell people to star your repo than asking them to subscribe to issues and become a contributor on equal footing.
You need something like "stars" or "project member" as part of your contributor ladder.
Did you know that YouTube channels cannot get a non-randomized URL or be searchable by the channel title unless you have 1000 subs? (How do you get 1000 subs when nobody can search for or find your channel unless you hand them a link? I guess by pounding pavement...)
As an OSS maintainer, I don't think that stars do anything except for number go up, but you'd be surprised the things that "number go up" can help with.
[1]https://docs.github.com/en/account-and-profile/setting-up-an...
> The project is constantly improving with new changes being implemented on a daily basis. You can keep up by hitting the Star button!
I'm seeing this as a trend, but how does this actually work? Are you scraping user details from their profile pages, and are you sure that's allowed? Are you using some mechanism in GitHub to update users that have starred? Without understanding the actual mechanism used to keep users up-to-date, as hinted, it feels like misleading users to gain stars.