I don't think this is down to AI as the author suggests. I feel these repos were always about farming stars (or whatever else people are trying to get out of GitHub outside of code contribution).

I remember the first ones were genuinely cool and interesting, and you could tell someone made them because they actually liked the tools. But it quickly turned into dumping in whatever was popular in a given community, often tools the author hadn't tried even once. When a list has 100+ links, do you really think the author checked them one by one?

A list of a sensible size looks different, e.g. this one: https://github.com/ibraheemdev/modern-unix