I'm with the other commenters on this issue. Stars are good enough as a marker, since you can use other markers (like # of contributors and recent commits) to make your own mind regarding quality of a repo.
Code quality is (Number of stars + number of forks * median number of commits per fork + 10 * number of closed issues + 100 * number of open issues + 3 * number of dependent packages + 0.01 * number of installs in the last 30 days) * number of commits in the last 100 days * number of core contributors active in the last 7 days / percentage of lines of code with no test coverage / (1+the number of open CVEs in dependencies) * the vibe factor
An easy one would be to promote projects that look like actual useful projects that contain code. Most of the ultra-starred things I see are awesome lists or otherwise non-useful markdown listicles and blogs.
It's fraudulent only because Github use "stars" to rank popular repos.
I think a repo should be ranked by code quality and update activity rather than "stars"