That is kind of answered in the topic title. Popular is often mean commonly installed and used. Bundling them for Self Hipsters means you don’t need to take time to install them. Many plugins and TC eventually were merged with the core program.
The benefit of having these start our as plugins allows for development time to test consumers preferences and fully fletch them out.
Sure there will be a variety of communities that don’t use any of the newly bundled with core. But the larger metric likely shows these are often ones that are installed after setup. Then if course they also have the metrics from their paid hosting of plugins used and not used in the base tier.
I missed 2 plugins before my rebuild. The error log though was much better improved to identify this easily compared to before where you had to scroll up and identify the issue
I think the prompt David mentioned is either the rebuild error or might be on your plugin page for web updating.