React has been around for over a decade, and in that time pretty significantly impacted web dev paradigms (along with a few other mediums).
It’s hard to imagine being a web developer today and not knowing at least some react.
OpenClaw has been around for like a few months? And maybe it’s on its way to having that sort of impact? But right now seems to he mostly the purview of very early adopters and AI influencers.
It's popular because people are exploring "what can i do with compute" once again. React is as meaningless as tickless kernels for vast majority of people.
Should be noted that i am not using any claws. Just a person remembering people spending their nights programming all sorts of psychedelic displays in qbasic with some moving on to asm. Asm for fun.
It's larger than literally every open source service I thought to use as a benchmark. Rust, React, Vue, Symfony, Laravel, PHP Stan, Python, ESlint, rails, LLVM, Spring, fucking Linux itself.
I would wager the legitimate stars for OpenClaw are single digit percents of this. But hey, I haven't actually run the numbers on the GitHub API.