Similar data could probably be compiled from Google Trends, but this clean and authoritative view is something that can be trusted, and I think the result makes the open-source ecosystem stronger.
I'll happily tell you my toolset, but I don't use home brew and I wouldn't allow it to send my usage to google even if I did
Just because someone on the internet had a particular setup doesn't mean I want to follow it. Or that I have time to track down several people's opinions.
Getting install stats directly from the homebrew project, which I know because I use it, is infinitely more useful to me and much more easily discoverable. that's just my opinion though and you're entitled to your own.
That also gives you more context, because it's answering your actual question, rather than trying to answer your own question with a bunch of vaguely related data.
It also handles the dependency issue. Someone asked why imagemagick is so popular, but its probably actually just a dependency for language-level bindings (e.g. php-imagick), not that people are using `convert` or `identify` directly on the CLI.
Heck, consider the case of front-end developers who have a toolset that depends on nodejs. They may never write any server side code, but if they follow recent trends they probably need nodejs for their css/js "toolchain" - the stats don't tell you that though. They just tell you that nodejs is installed a lot.
This list was added specifically because a bunch of people expressed concerns about this data not being public. You can please some of the people all of the time, etc.