Agree with your thoughts. I had to find a way to proxy for popularity, as data isn't easy to get regarding viewership... :/

Spent quite an amount of time cleaning the data I retrieved from Kaggle. Didn't retrieve it on my own but used what others did. Thanks for the comment!

Still improving my design skills - will look into adding a thin layout next time.

As for the 2nd graph, it was rather hard for me to decide. Initially, I titled it engagement level instead of popularity. By engagement level, I looked into the number of ratings and favourites. Perhaps, I could have factored in 'members' as well - but the effect is negligible as an anime with a high number of 'members' usually have a relatively high favourites/score_by. In that respect, you are right, using members would be less cumbersome to illustrate popularity. However, I wasn't sure how an Anime viz would do on dataisbeautiful, considering demographics, so I thought favourites and score_by would be more intuitive for everyone, without having to justify the 'members' part.

TL:dr: Agree with your points!

Source 1 : https://myanimelist.net/
Source 2: Dataset - https://www.kaggle.com/datasets/azathoth42/myanimelist

Dataset is cleaned using Excel and TableauPrep
Illustration done using Canva. Designed inspired by TheEconomist.
Pictures from respective anime titles.