Agreed - it's great to see what people have been contributing to and working on - but the number of commits and days in a row with a commit seem like meaningless data.
Well, measuring the quality of commits is an AI-complete task, so we need some proxies. Number of commits seems to encourage more small commits, which AFAIR is what is preferred in Git. Days in a row is an old "don't break the chain" trick.
> Streak? C'mon, what is this, Xbox Live?
Most likely, yes. I guess it's not about what that data means, it's more about what it does to you. I dread to use this word, but it's gamification.