Completely agree. It’s what Edward Tufte calls a slopegraph. His canonical example is surprisingly similar to the data used here. His one design is better than any of these 100 - it shows the actual numbers, and removes the unnecessary vertical lines.

https://www.edwardtufte.com/notebook/slopegraphs-for-compari...

I suppose the whole point of this exercise is to show different ways to tell _different_ stories? (real time edit: “how we can tell different stories” from the source)

#54 is good for showing comparable increases in sites between years, right? But if the story you’re telling is primarily “how many sites were there then? How many now?” you kinda have to squint and guess. (One could improve on this one, as you suggest. But the primary story would still be rates of change.)

#60 is also good. Most of the others... a lot of them (#16, #22, #26, etc.) I guess would work as eyecandy to put on the side of an article when you don't know what else to put there, but I don't think I could think of a dataset which they're useful for, let alone this dataset being a good showcase for them