"Years ago I dedicated a Flex Friday (our version of 20% time) to stargazers, a tool to query the CockroachDB repository for information about its GitHub stars and analyze the results. At the time of writing, we had 6,000+ stars (which felt like a lot), and the data in this blog will be based on that original set of 6,000 stargazers."
"GitHub allows visitors to star a repo to bookmark it for later perusal. Stars represent a casual interest in a repo, and when enough of them accumulate, it's natural to wonder what's driving interest. Stargazers attempts to get a handle on who these users are by finding out what else they've starred, which other repositories they've contributed to, and who's following them on GitHub."
This doesn't answer OP's question. OP asks why projects link to the page showing who starred them, not what some tool named stargazers does or/and what data can be gathered from people that starred a project.
edit: Thinking about it, probably does. Basically someone will check the stargazers page to find what people that have starred a particular project are up to or what else they may have found. This may seen as a waste of time on projects with numerous stars but becomes really useful in small niche projects with low number of stars.
https://www.cockroachlabs.com/blog/what-can-we-learn-from-ou...
"Years ago I dedicated a Flex Friday (our version of 20% time) to stargazers, a tool to query the CockroachDB repository for information about its GitHub stars and analyze the results. At the time of writing, we had 6,000+ stars (which felt like a lot), and the data in this blog will be based on that original set of 6,000 stargazers."
Which links to
https://github.com/spencerkimball/stargazers
"GitHub allows visitors to star a repo to bookmark it for later perusal. Stars represent a casual interest in a repo, and when enough of them accumulate, it's natural to wonder what's driving interest. Stargazers attempts to get a handle on who these users are by finding out what else they've starred, which other repositories they've contributed to, and who's following them on GitHub."