While I agree with everything else in this article, I'm wondering why you wouldn't consider a GitHub profile to be a source of useful data? Stars in GitHub are an acknowlegement of quality and utility of a repository to others.
In general, I find that GitHub tells me a lot more about the kind of developer I'm dealing with, not least of which because I can get a sense of their code/approach to code as well as their interests and how they communicate with others when defending or reviewing pull requests.