Michael probably can’t say it, but there’s a lot of people out there looking for “just” Gnome without it’s original developers. For illustration you may simply google “gnome devs” and read the titles popping up. That said, lots of drama and not the most worthwhile usage of your time.
It’s probably best to take this whole graph with a grain of salt. There’s already some questionable relationships in it, like for every 4th Manjaro user coming in a Gentoo user, which I find hard to believe to say the list.
Second, it’s hard to say Pop exclamation mark underscore OS is on the decline when the whole field just looks more diversified in general. Sure the hype around gaming distros from the lockdowns seems to have cooled down a bit, but there isn’t any distro that just disappeared. On the contrary, it seems to have gotten just more.
As already mentioned, we can expect another hype again when Cosmic DE launches.
Which rolls back to the original comment. If their first party app is indeed that profitable where’s the marketing and promotion towards potential buyers?