Have you considered that the design is more important than the data in this context? I mean, I sure don't care worth a damn whether there are 100, 1000, or 10000 orders being placed per second. It's a meaningless figure to me.
* competitors
* creditors
* investors
* employees
* academics
* journalists
* policymakers in financial services
The design is not valuable to anyone, even to those who have no serious business with the data but who somehow feel the need to defend the design in the comments section, because regardless of the design they would visit the link anyway for the information it contains and because of the clickbaity title, not because of the design.
Stripe is not building this to make sure that competitors, creditors, investors, employees, academics, journalists or policy makers have access to important data, that's just not the function of this dashboard.
Those unsure that Stripe will be reliably there for them might be swayed by seeing this during their holiday break. At least that's the marketing theory.
Aesthetics are absolutely a factor on the efficacy of marketing activities, and making it "fun" or "pretty" or "flashy" is part of that.
Who do you think are the customers of Stripe’s API? Are those people going to make business decisions on the basis of theatrics, or does pragmatism, performance, and stability matter more?