@hkmike I was thinking the same thing and came across some posts on stats
I was trying to figure out which compact phone was most likely to be supported by Lineage for the next 2 years. To do this I looked at maintainer and community activity of a few devices to see how much backing there was. It’s not an exact science, and as was seen with (i think) the galaxy S7, a maintainer can leave without much prior notice at any time.
My limited understanding is sometimes all it takes is a small number of dedicated manianters to keep a deivce up to date on Lineage (or /e/), so it does not necessarily have to be a largely popular (number of downloads) device in order to survive.