The most-installed JS frameworks aren't the most-starred — I checked 14 (opens in new tab)

GitHub stars are the default way we judge a JS project's popularity. But stars measure who's watching a project, not who's shipping with it. So I pulled GitHub stars and npm weekly downloads for 14 JS frameworks to see how far apart "mindshare" and "actual usage" really are. The gap was bigger than I expected. The most-installed tools aren't the most-starred Three anchors: Hono has 31k stars and 44.8M installs/week. TanStack Query, 49.8k stars and 58.5M installs/week. Next.js, 140k stars and ...