As I said on the first line, no ranking of any kind can be trusted 100%, I pointed out an alternative to distrowatch, and why I would trust it a bit more, not saying I really trust it, or that I believe every result.

It is less popular so it could be a case like OpenMandriva has it integrated to upload automatically for all its users by default, or they found another way to game that ranking.

When I see any ranking, I do research when I see a distro that is suspiciously positioned, and I haven't heard about outside the place I saw it referenced, and even so I always stick to mainline distros.

Honest results would need a standard way that every distro adopts and make an opt-out (not opt-in) regular upload thing similar to what linux-hardware.org does, and be actively trying to mitigate or deny certain distros or specific actors from tampering with the results, and we don't have that.

Page rankings, clicks, scripts, etc. are not enough if every device doesn't ping it in a legitimate way (fake user agent or other means), and there is always the case of people that will opt-out or block this as they don't want to be tracked.

On your point of something like Alexa Page Rankings, the thing I would add is that, at least for me, if it is a ranking shown by a corporation, it is not trustworthy.