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Popularity might not be the best indicator of quality, but it's a pretty good indicator of longevity of the project - and this is, I think, more important, in the long term at least.

All the technical superiority of an unpopular library will amount to nothing if couple of months down the road the author will not be interested in fixing some obscure, but important bug, nor there will be anyone to take on the maintenance from him/her.

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Importantly, like you said, it's also the measure of some level of quality. It's incredibly, incredibly rare that a tech project becomes popular without any level of quality. A lot of people could do much worse than that combination (some quality + longevity)

Nothing exists without some (possibly very low) level of quality, but by any measure of quality other than popularity itself, popular things may fall anywhere in the quality spectrum.

> Popularity might not be the best indicator of quality, but it's a pretty good indicator of longevity of the project

Certain projects have either a niche audience, are less known, less easily groked by users, etc.

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