"very" might be an overstatement. but it does exist there

I don't think it's at risk of being overstatement. CW bands are more crowded than ever before, because there are more CW ops than ever before.

This is, I think, because it's easier to learn than ever, ham radio equipment is more capable for a cheaper (adjusted) price, and ham radio has grown tremendously worldwide due to all barriers being lowered a bit.

CW is very popular, especially given all the other options that are easier.

That it's a smaller percentage of hams that know CW than before is another way of saying ham radio has expanded well beyond CW and the population has grown. But if you have a finite resource (bandwidth) and it's in significantly more demand than ever before, it's a hard argument to suggest that it's not 'very' active.

In the 2024 field day contest that lasts 24 hours, 490,813 Morse code contacts were made between participants. Just turning on my radio now I heard more than 10 conversations in Morse happening and that was just on one of the 10 popular frequency bands.

31,628 people participated in field day 2024. google says there are ~750,000 amateur radio licenses in the US and ~3 million world wide. my experience with field day is that it attracts the most dedicated subset of radio amateurs, a group which (also in my experience) vastly over represents cw users. combined with the point of field day being to make as many contacts as possible, combined with cw being one of if not the best way to make difficult and long distant contacts.. can you see why i doubt field day results are an accurate representation of normal, average amateur radio?

i have attended club meetings and activities, hamfests local and around the US, participated in online forums etc for many years. morse code isn't a big topic anywhere outside of very specialized contexts, such as field day and qrp operation.

On the surface, it seems like CW usage should be in a decline because 1) CW is no longer required to get a license in most countries and 2) digital modes like FT8 are clearly superior at very low signal-to-noise ratios.

But the bands tell the opposite story, as crowded as they often are. I think the primary reason to use CW these days is because it's fun, it feels like you're really doing something and not just delegating the whole task to the computer, and CW is definitely far better than SSB for DX at low, possibly QRP, power.