Discussion on: How I exploited NPM downloads... and why you shouldn't trust them

In this context however, the "caching" part of that description is rather noteworthy as it means the majority of downloads from yarn users won't contribute to download counts on NPM due to cache hits.

Slight correction - in 2017 we switched from a Cloudflare caching to a simple CNAME to the npm registry. So downloads via Yarn are counted just like any download from npm.