I've often felt that an updated version of Stars! would be very well received. So many current 4x games are hyper-micro-management and Stars! had a perfect balance (IMHO) between management and overall strategy.
Alas, Planets.nu has no source code available. That's OK if you just want to play, but I really always wanted to make some changes, and to self-host (like you kinda could in the original vga planets)
The UI and server are relatively simple though, so it should be a fun exercise to vibe-code a clone based on phost and openplanets.