As can be seen in this mail.python.org article, download stats were removed because they weren't updating and would be too difficult to fix.
Donald Stufft, the author of the article, listed these reasons:
There are numerous reasons for their removal/deprecation some of which
are:
- Technically hard to make work with the new CDN
- The CDN is being donated to the PSF, and the donated tier does not offer any form of log access
- The work around for not having log access would greatly reduce the utility of the CDN
- Highly inaccurate
- A number of things prevent the download counts from being inaccurate, some of which include:
- pip download cache
- Internal or unofficial mirrors
- Packages not hosted on PyPI (for comparisons sake)
- Mirrors or unofficial grab scripts causing inflated counts (Last I looked 25% of the downloads were from a known mirroring
script).
- Not particularly useful
- Just because a project has been downloaded a lot doesn't mean it's good
- Similarly just because a project hasn't been downloaded a lot doesn't mean it's bad
