I see now how GitHub stars are something of a promotional ranking, even though I myself don’t use GitHub on a day to day basis.
As for the idea of having people do a small write-up about how they arrived at a particular solution, it is a good idea. A sort of community blog perhaps? Something like how OpenStreetMap has user diaries. Maybe it can be incorporated into the community newsletter somehow. Just some loose ideas.
I also don’t use Github except to report an occasional bug for another project.