You seem to imply bad programmers use these services to star-boost their otherwise mediocre code. That might be the case, but there are other –at least conceivable, if not yet proven– use cases for these star-boosting services, such as typosquatting, the promotion of less secure software as part of supply chain attacks (with organizations sticking to vulnerable libraries or frameworks in the erroneous belief that they are more popular and better maintained than alternatives, for example) and plain malware distribution.