Badges are toxic because they divert a subset of people away from their current open source workflow to focus on getting badges. In reality, the incentive of a lot of these badges is for GitHub's best interest and not necessarily a project's. This is insidious.
To finish my badge collection, I need:
* Merged a pull request without a review - 100% toxic.
* Answer 32 discussions - this is a strong incentive to enable GitHub Discussions on a project, which is the wrong move
* Create a repository and get 4096 stars - diverting focus from the projects I maintain (although I'm a core contributor to a project which meets this requirement, I didn't create it)
* Coauthor 38 more commits on merged pull requests - this'll happen over time. Not a 'bad' thing, but not something I want to take time to achieve.
To finish my badge collection, I need:
* Merged a pull request without a review - 100% toxic.
* Answer 32 discussions - this is a strong incentive to enable GitHub Discussions on a project, which is the wrong move
* Create a repository and get 4096 stars - diverting focus from the projects I maintain (although I'm a core contributor to a project which meets this requirement, I didn't create it)
* Coauthor 38 more commits on merged pull requests - this'll happen over time. Not a 'bad' thing, but not something I want to take time to achieve.