I mean, yes, but I don’t think anyone is intending to do use packages only based one factor. Popularity is a reasonable heuristic for quality and long-term continued support. And my reading of OP is that they’re trying to gauge the popularity to use it for that. I think it’s also a decent enough measure for discovery, since usefulness (hopefully) should correlate with popularity and the latter is more measurable.

In the past, I’ve used Fcitix (in Plasma anyway) and found it to work well.

Since I switched distros and moved to Wayland though, I haven’t managed to get it working again.

I’ve replaced all my aimless Reddit scrolling with Lemmy. I’m not so purist I refuse to go there though - there’s still a lot of good info organized there, and it’s still decent for searches.

I’ve replaced Twitter too. Ironically Facebook is the one that sticks around, despite being probably the most user-hostile. That one’s built around people I know IRL and it’s not so easy to drop in a replacement. Even though it’s not very good for that or any purpose.