Right, which is why I said they're proxies for popularity. We don't actually know what people are running on their computers so we use these proxies. They're not perfect, but they're a lot better than number of stars on the Github repo (TFA) or number of Google results (Tiobe).

I also realise that StackOverflow has a bias towards newbies but that's not a bad thing. It just means that it's a forward looking prediction. The newbies of today are the grizzled veterans of 2030.