They were probably going by the Repology stats, which use a cross-distro notion of 'projects' rather than individual packages, which is why their figure was giv

They were probably going by the Repology stats, which use a cross-distro notion of 'projects' rather than individual packages, which is why their figure was given as excluding subports https://repology.org/repositories/statistics/nonunique https://repology.org/repositories/statistics/nonunique