Much of the discussion in your first link seems very old. There is a link buried in there to this discussion in 2015, when it was suggested that the trend may be reversing (based on the questionable decision to focus on “active” editors making more than 100 edits a month). It would be surprising if the growth in internet use over the past decade had not increased the number of Wikipedia editors at all. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2...

I’m suspicious too, but I agree with the grandparent that we should tread very carefully. Wikipedia’s success probably has at least something to do with the fact that its development has been extremely slow and isolated from commercial web development trends.