Ask HN: Who uses commit statistics and for which purpose?

I am genuinely curious (also this is not my field). Given that commits can be anything from fixing a typo in the doc to fixing a bug to adding features, what can commit statistics as provided by e.g. GitLab or GitHub be used for? Also for a public repo, I would be interested in the number of downloads but this doesn't seem to be provided. Are there features only available with a certain type of subscription?