idk if 75k IP Addresses are really “seeing all the IP addresses there is to see” – I know NAT and even double NAT is common in countries like China where per-capita IPv4 addresses reserved were very limited, but I think especially in the US and Europe it’s never been an issue and most residential broadband clients have their unique public IP, not to mention they are dynamic so you should see more than 1 unique IP from a user after a while
I think the # of monthly request to Pkg server can also be misleading, maybe company or individual deployed Julia but forgot to signal they’re bots (I know this is done in CI but I can imagine companies manually deploying Julia may not know).
In fact, the # of active users on Discourse would corroborate with the story “unique IP addresses” is telling – that since the beginning of 2022 there hasn’t been a significant increase in active/pro users in the wild.
Alternatively, maybe the story “# of Pkg server request” is telling is the real one, and there are other explanation to why Discourse visits didn’t go up as much (e.g. Zulip, Slack diverted visits, communities like Makie has its own Discord server etc.), and maybe lack in up tick in unique IP Address is due to new users primarily grew in developing countries or they are clustered in institutional IP addresses (universities, national labs)