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I don't think it's a useless metric and it's one I use myself, but it can also be gamed pretty easily. So the more people making decisions based on downloads, the higher the likelihood of bots generating downloads just to juice the stats.

Well it is useful as first level filter just like GH stars.

If it has no downloads/stars you don’t care. If it has big amount let’s take time checking it out.

Fun part starts when checking out part is limited to some minimum and goes to prod because it solves something. Where people might not even know if that library is any good at all.

And if your users know about "a cache" you won't get downloads. So iy's more beneficial if your users are the kind of noobs who redownload all the crap every single time rather than having fast CI

May be with these rules: - Per user account we only count one clone - We don't count anonymous clones

But I agree it's not like this is also without any issues