It’s not, it’s just how hackernews works. You’ll see new projects hit 1k-10k stars in a matter of a day. You can have the best project, best article to you but if everyone else doesn’t think so it’ll always be at the bottom. Some luck involved too. Bots upvoting a post not organically I doubt is gonna live long on first page.

The stars are on GitHub, they can come from somewhere else, e.g. the author himself buying stars.

Hi, I'm the developer's father. Trust me, he hasn't bought a single star in his life—not even in Super Mario :p

This is hella common. Companies have too much money to spend.

But, star buying for GitHub is a thing too. This is why you have to look at things like number of contributors, forks, watchers, and pull requests. Just a lot of stars, without the other positive indicators, can be an indication that the project is not so engaging as it might seem or its supposed popularity is fake.

That's not how it works. My publication with (subjectively) better language barely had a couple of comments and github stars.

Definitely could be, but the dev has been posting updates on Twitter for a while now. It could be just some amount of hype they have built.