From 2,500 requests to 24: Rebuilding star history without the stargazers

Maintainers look at star history to answer a practical question: did a launch, release, or event change a project’s trajectory? To reconstruct that curve from the GitHub API, tools had to request pages of stargazer records (each person who currently stars the repository and when they starred it), keep the timestamps, and throw the identities away. Over time, that design created problems at both ends.