Long-term Google trends graphs are kind of useless because they're a percentage of queries over a period of time when the demographics of the user base was changing as millions of new people got on the internet.
Clearly javascript has been slowly dying out. But wait, that can't be right.
They're also a poor proxy for usage because the existing user base with feeds already set up doesn't have to do a search query to continue using it, so if a large number of them lose access at once, it's barely a blip because they wouldn't be doing searches for it either way.
You probably didn't want to come across this way, but we should note that the absence of a better metric is not by itself a reason to use a bad one.
If a metric is sufficiently decorrelated with the thing we want to measure, it should be ignored altogether, regardless of whether we have anything better.
Here's the one for javascript:
https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=javascri...
Clearly javascript has been slowly dying out. But wait, that can't be right.
They're also a poor proxy for usage because the existing user base with feeds already set up doesn't have to do a search query to continue using it, so if a large number of them lose access at once, it's barely a blip because they wouldn't be doing searches for it either way.