It's an approximation, but if you don't do that, someone creating and updating a container in a loop (or intentionally running wget in a loop) will skew the statistics arbitrarily.

I don't think there is a more precise way to do it without compromising privacy. Obviously if you are willing to compromise privacy you can send information such as whether the distribution is running in a container or VM and the NIC MAC address and a persistent identifier, but that would be unacceptable since it is not in the interests of users to send that.

> > distinct IP addresses

> NAT would like to laugh at you

Not just NAT. On many ISPs, power cycling the CPE changes the IP address.