Basically any Github metric in isolation doesn't mean much. Anecdotally, I once worked on a ML framework in Rust[0]. For at least a few months after release the metrics looked good on paper (Top 5 Rust project by stars at the time) and also had a few smaller contributors. Sadly next to no actual adoption and no healthy community around it that was able to pick it up after we had to stop maintenance.
Downloads are about as bad. Just have one or a few users that have CI or deployment patterns that download the package a lot, and your numbers lost any meaning.