I had a similar experience where a competitor released an academic paper rife with mistakes and misunderstandings of how my software worked. Instead of reaching out and trying to understand how their system was different than mine they used their incorrect data to draw their conclusions. I became rather disillusioned with academic papers as a result of how they were able to get away with publishing verifiably wrong data.
Maybe it depends on the type of business/ customers that you have because I've had the opposite experience. For us as a security SaaS, B2B enterprise is incredibly stable and predictable. B2C has a lot more variability and payment issues compared to large orgs with dedicated procurement departments, vendor processes etc.
The old PIPS ALPR devices aren't online anymore but they had horrible security as well. Just sending a newline to their UDP port would cause them to send you all images as they were being collected in real-time - no authentication needed. And the images had the license plate information encoded in the JPG metadata. I did a talk about it at some point (https://imgur.com/HHcpJOr) and worked with EFF to take them offline
In absolute numbers probably not highly representative but the relative numbers are meaningful to measure adoption. And no, it requires the user to disable authentication in order to get the service details to differentiate between Redis and Valkey. But again, you can compare unauthenticated Redis to unauthenticated Valkey to see how the percentages are changing over time.
