I disagree Jeff - they are of huge relevance to community health. Community members love seeing how the forum is doing year on year. These kind of stats are incredibly useful for boosting morale, and showing the community all their hard work has been paying off (as well as, yes, demonstrating the popularity of the forum - or in many cases like ours - an indication of how the topic of the forum is doing).
It’s not great having to hunt around for stats - ideally stats intended for community managers should be where you would expect to find them (in this case that’s the stats page - i.e the dashboard).