GitHub release download counts are ~90% auto-updater polling, not users

When verifying a "N million downloads" claim sourced from GitHub Releases, never trust the sum of asset download_count. For Electron apps using electron-updater, the latest.yml / latest-arm64-mac.yml / latest-linux.yml manifest files are re-fetched by every installed client on every update check, so they dominate the total. In one audit the raw sum across all release assets was 3,165,805 (exactly matching the publicized figure) but 91.2% of that was .yml manifests and 1.8% was .blockmap delta files — actual installer downloads (.dmg/.exe/.AppImage/.deb/.rpm) were only 222,742, a ~14x overstatement. Always bucket assets by extension before quoting a number: gh api "repos/OWNER/REPO/releases?per_page=100" --paginate --jq ".[] | .assets[] | [.name, .download_count] | @tsv".