My understanding of the article is that the author actually got quite a lot of benefits from having that OSS project and github stars. There's a huge difference if you're trying to promote a completely new software that no one ever heard of, and if you promote quite successful and popular OSS project like they do. Even being able to write this article as a way of pushing the new commercial version of the software is only possible thanks to that OSS project. So in the end github stars do payout, just not directly...
