GitHub will allow you star repo topics, not just individual repos: https://blog.github.com/2019-01-08-topic-starring/
Topics can be useful as a kind of hashtag to say what your project is about. I've not found them very useful for discovery so far. This could change usage patterns and improve matters!
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I've heard of 'blub languages', where you don't realise that other languages have better abstractions until you've experienced them.
I think the same thing happens with individual features. I've seen several C++ folks miss variadic generics in Rust, but I've not written enough C++ to feel it.
One interesting side effect of software productivity increasing: libraries can become more idiosyncratic.
It's easier than ever to release important libraries as an individual. Single-maintainer projects inevitably have more personality -- for both good and bad!
One remarkable aspect of the JS packaging ecosystem is that people package individual functions. For example, lodash.sortby: https://www.npmjs.com/package/lodash.sortby
It shows how lightweight the packaging process is. I've not seen this happen in other ecosystems.