The hero badge strip only surfaced version, stars, commit recency, and license, so readers could not see package traction or repo trust signals without leaving the page. This adds monthly downloads, CI status, and OpenSSF Scorecard badges, and repairs the canonical about-description metadata hooks in README so the repo's own metadata test matches the current hero layout.

Constraint: Keep the visible hero copy compact and GitHub README-friendly
Rejected: Replace the visible About nav label with the raw filename link text | degrades the landing copy
Rejected: Change the metadata test instead of README | leaves the canonical description source hidden from the README surface
Confidence: high
Scope-risk: narrow
Reversibility: clean
Directive: Do not remove the canonical about-description comments without updating test/metadata.test.js expectations
Tested: node --test test/metadata.test.js
Tested: npm test
Tested: openspec validate --specs
Not-tested: Live GitHub render of external Shields and Scorecard badge fetches