The current last version still had problems but I think I figured it out. Metal-and-stars-graphics needs ERM and perhaps armoured biters as a dependency.
It looks like medal-and-stars-graphics gets loaded before the main mod but at that time neither ERM nor armored biters are yet loaded, at least not on my setup. Adding them to the info.json seemed to let it load up, at least.
Haven't reached in-game yet due to problems with other mods but I'm fairly confident updating the dependencies for the graphics mod will fix this problem.