I understand that it's not for everyone, but I also feel like people here tend to forget that GitHub is a social coding/collaboration platform as well. If you didn't like these features, why are your projects on GitHub then? Plenty of other git solutions.
I see some comments worried about this feature being abused or misused in regards to "bad contributions" however those contributions would either just be rejected, as they should, or accepted by the maintainers which means the badges worked to begin with, promoting more open-source collaboration.