I want to preface this by saying I don't have a dog in this fight. Not a big react fan in general although I write it for work, and have no opinions on specific routers or 3rd-party state libraries being better or worse than others.

With that out of the way, where is the research showing that this is a good indicator of software reliability? Highly starred projects are left unfinished and abandoned all the time. The thread above goes into details about upgrade challenges. So it seems stars are maybe not such a good indicator of reliability. What about using a star to issue ratio? I've personally seen multiple projects with 10k+ stars that hide their bug reports in the discussions tab. Terraform has a much worse ratio, but would you describe it as much less reliable?

Show me the research.

I agree that stars alone don't equate to reliability, which is why I used (the very much imperfect, but better) stars/issue as part of the evidence.

While I'm unaware of research supporting stars/issue, it's a useful rule-of-thumb at the extremes. With React (318), if something isn't working, your code is almost certainly wrong. With Bun (24), if something isn't working, it's likely Bun (sorry, Jarred).

The assertion the Remix creators are "extremely hostile to anything resembling stability" should place Remix at the lowest extreme, but that isn't so.

If you use a metric or rule-of-thumb for evaluating reliability, I'm curious to hear it.

Gotcha so that is sort of a precursor to a deeper inquiry it sounds like. I'm concerned it sounds like there may be a strong bias in favor of popularity. Maybe that is less of an issue for developers already shopping within a specific stack/philosophy though.

I tend to try and ignore stars, because I've been burned by popular and unpopular projects alike. They also seem to be gamed at times. For an initial evaluation of something I might actually use I look at who the owners are, when the project was last updated, and explore the issue tracker (including closed tickets). That is usually enough to identify projects with major problems. If they pass the initial audit, then the process continues.

I haven’t used Remix, but I regret choosing react-router due to frequent major version upgrades.

If you are happy with one version you can just stick to it?

You don't have to update your phone and laptop every year, even if you are made to feel so.

In our case we wanted to upgrade another dependency (react-admin) which necessitated a react-router upgrade, which we used throughout the rest of our application, so it was a reasonable amount of work and sticking to the old one was not an option.

I wish this were true. In the modern JavaScript ecosystem you either pin everything or pin nothing.

You do have to upgrade. At some point incompatibilities between libraries arise, and if neglected for too long at some point it becomes impossible to update everything. Keeping dependencies up to date is an important part of software maintenance.

Those breaking changes were especially painful in React Native apps. Thankfully there are some good alternatives now.

Would you mind sharing what are they?

You could take a look at these:

https://tanstack.com/router/latest

https://github.com/molefrog/wouter/

Wouter is great, I recommend.

...and completely changing how everything works on each major version change.

Take one more sir.

This is a weird metric.

I don't think issues are a good measurement for popular repos. Majority of them are just basic skill issues and inability to read 2 pages of docs.

Especially next community seems to be full of people who don't seem to know anything about web development complaining because they don't know how cookies work or something...

Stars don't mean usage.

Remix has 21,375 downloads per week according to npm. Next has 6,562,587.

The remix package is no longer used[1]. Remix's central package is @remix-run/router[2], which has 5,627,846 downloads per week.

[1] https://github.com/remix-run/remix/pull/9433 [2] https://www.npmjs.com/package/@remix-run/router

Hey I star projects just as a way of bookmarking them..

Using “star / issue ratio” is a basis for your point is just an indicator that you’re too deep into the JS ecosystem. It reads into weird GitHub metrics to a unique degree.