Aligns the star ranking with the rule the skills index already follows:
GitHub is consulted only by the twice-daily skills-index.yml schedule, whose
artifact every docs deploy reuses. deploy-site.yml now runs
fetch-plugin-stars.py without --probe (reuse-only: artifact → live site copy →
disk → empty) and cannot call the API at all, so a same-day merge train adds
zero requests regardless of cache age.
The probe itself collapses from one REST call per repo (~26 today, growing
with the catalog) to a single GraphQL query with aliased repository fields,
so the scheduled run costs one request no matter how big the catalog gets. A
failed probe (rate limit, renamed repo, bad token) keeps the previous counts.
Catalog entries sort official → stars desc → name, both in browse shelves and
filtered grids, with a ★ pill on each card linking to the repo's stargazers.
Rate-limit discipline is the design constraint: the docs site deploys many
times a day and shares one GitHub App API budget with every other workflow
(tonight's merge train got rate-limited on unrelated uploads). So
website/scripts/fetch-plugin-stars.py first fetches the live site's own
plugin-stars.json (a CDN GET, not the API); if that cache is under 24h old it
is reused verbatim and GitHub is never called. Only a stale cache triggers one
GET /repos/{owner}/{repo} per unique catalog repo, and a 403/429 mid-run keeps
the previous counts instead of zeroing them. extract-plugins.py merges the
cache into plugins.json (`stars`) and plugins-meta.json (`starsFetchedAt`), and
the page footnote says when the ranking was last refreshed.