I don't have an immediate direct source but read yesterday GitHub stars are being "obfuscated" because they're being scraped to spam popular projects -- or something similar.

Edit found the link [0], do not believe it mentions reason but links github blog

From Github [1]: > These endpoints and views currently expose public lists of stargazers and watchers, and this information has increasingly been misused to collect user data for spam activities which negatively impacts user experience and platform trust.

[0]: https://www.star-history.com/blog/github-stargazer-api-restr...

[1] https://github.blog/changelog/2026-06-30-upcoming-access-res...