Great for Astro..

About the download stats for open source frameworks and libraries.. I keep reading claims of "millions of weekly downloads" -- surely this is a noisy metric, right?

NPM just counts GET requests. A significant number of those must be from CI/CD pipelines, mirrors, build servers, etc.

It still signals popularity, but probably to a much lesser degree than implied.

How to measure the popularity of FOSS projects though?

Number of downloads? Number of stars on GH? Number of content on social medias?

The absolute value is meaningless in itself, but there's a big difference between a library that is downloaded a thousand or millions of times each week. That's the idea.

Meanwhile for-profit projects have actual customers or revenues to demonstrate popularity.

VC still use github stars as a viable metric, at some point you have to say aloud that they are basically engaging in shammanism and ritual sacrifices.