I think you can pull much of the data you need for such a project from the GH Archive https://www.gharchive.org/ They basically have captured every event that happened on the platform starting from 2011.
IMDb works mainly by user reviews who rate videos from 1 to 10. But personally, I think any system can be gamed, just like GitHub Stars. When I'm interested in the GitHub Top 250 (as equivalent to IMDb Top 250), I just do a GitHub search with a filter for the language I'm interested in, e.g., Python, and then sort by stars. This works good enough for me.
IMDb works mainly by user reviews who rate videos from 1 to 10. But personally, I think any system can be gamed, just like GitHub Stars. When I'm interested in the GitHub Top 250 (as equivalent to IMDb Top 250), I just do a GitHub search with a filter for the language I'm interested in, e.g., Python, and then sort by stars. This works good enough for me.