Stars are one of the most flexible symbols in flag design. They can represent states, provinces, unity, guidance, or a country's place in the wider world.
No flag illustrates "the star count actually means something" better than the United States flag, mostly because it's had to keep proving it. The original 1777 flag had 13 stars for the 13 founding states. Every time a new state joined the union, the flag legally had to change to add another star, and it's happened 27 separate times since, each one a genuine, formal redesign, not just a casual update. The most recent change came in 1960, adding the 50th star for Hawaii, and it's the longest-serving version in the flag's history purely because no new state has joined since. There's even a specific, standardised arrangement for how the stars are laid out in rows, it's not just scattered freely.
Both flags lean on the Southern Cross, the constellation visible from the southern hemisphere that's become a de facto symbol of the whole region, which is exactly why the two flags get mixed up so often despite being genuinely different designs. New Zealand's version uses four stars, all red with white outlines, representing the four brightest stars in the constellation. Australia's uses six: the same core Southern Cross pattern, but with an extra small star added, plus a completely separate seven-pointed Commonwealth Star sitting under the Union Jack in the corner, representing the federation of Australian states and territories. Once you know to count (four versus six, and whether there's an extra star tucked under the flag's canton), the two stop looking alike at all, but at a glance, especially in a small pie-chart preview, they're a genuinely easy mix-up.
Stars don't show up in a colour pie chart directly, since they're usually a small shape rather than a distinct colour slice, but a tiny sliver of an unexpected colour against a large plain background is often exactly that, a hint that a small star or emblem is sitting on the flag somewhere.
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