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One could argue that they lift people up, since there's a slight canceling of the effect of Earth's gravity when they're over head. Conversely, the opposite is true when they're on the other side of the planet.
The gravitational effect is only meaningful from the Moon and the Sun.
The Moon obviously affects the tides, and is very, very slowly making our days longer.
The Sun is ... you know, the center of the Solar System, defines our entire orbit, our year.
Nothing else is massive enough or close enough to have a meaningful gravitational impact.
Right, the post mentions "the Moon and stars." Last I checked, the Moon is still the Moon and the Sun is a star.
Also, I didn't say anything about the effect being meaningful. An effect that is non-zero is still an effect even if it is negligible.
I mean, if you want to be this pedantic...
'the stars'
99.999...% of 'the stars' are not the Sun.
99.999...% of 'the Moon and the stars' are neither the Moon nor the Sun.
And... I know you didn't say meaningful.
I did. That's my counter argument to your ... hypothetical? argument.
Further, when I say 'negligible' I mean... not actually empirically observable, not statistically different from 0, thus you could not establish any kind of causal mechanism with any legitimate basis.
Sure, you could calculate a theory of the difference of overall gravitational effect of 'the stars', but its going to be again negligible compared to local gravitational variances of the Earth itself, due to the Earth not being perfectly uniformly spherical, nor perfectly radially uniformly dense.