If you mostly use ChatGPT-style AI and you're trying not to fall behind, this is the shortcut to stop trusting: star counts are not sponsor demand. If you only track the surface-level hype, you can waste time, budget, and attention in the wrong place.
OmniRoute is a clean example. Its public repo shows 20.8k stars and 396 contributors, but Diego's public GitHub Sponsors page shows 1 current sponsor. That gap points to a different problem: not 'did people see it?' but 'why should I pay for this?' [C002]
What stood out on sponsors / diegosouzapw [C001] was how little the public page does to answer that question. It shows 1 current sponsor, 1 past sponsor, and mostly custom amounts. A payment button is not the same thing as a reason to pay.
And this is not a dead repo with no visibility. The public OmniRoute page shows 5,398 commits, 277 releases, and a latest version listed as v3.8.48 on 2026-07-13. So the useful lesson here is not 'small project, small support.' The project looks active and exposed. The public pages just do not show that attention converting into visible GitHub sponsorship.
One update is worth reading not because of how many features it lists, but because it changes your next decision. My version of that rule: stars get attention; a sharp reason to pay gets support. Public GitHub pages are not total revenue, but they are enough to break the lazy habit of treating stars as a stand-in for demand. Share this with anyone still using popularity as a proxy for willingness to pay.