The guy doing to videos and presented the graphs is also the guy who headed the creation of the service, and helped program it. If there is a significant division at DDB between the "business side" and "technical side", he isn't representative of that divide.
There was a person who used to post here, who in an interaction via PM that got us both a deserved vacation, tried to tell me that the forum in general clearly liked him more than me, because he had more XP than me.
Of course, I didn't bother pointing out that he also had been here for twice as long, and had twice as many posts, but only a couple hundred more XP...I just don't care about internet popularity contests enough to win that easily won "contest", I guess.
People are weird, is the point.
Is that why you come here? Certainly isn't why I'm here.
Also see, 5e rangers. Most people aren't satisfied with them, according to wotc polling, but they are in the high middle of classes played, according to wotc AND DDB data. Because people play concepts that they like, even when the mechanics aren't good.
Active characters were loosely defined in the most recent dev update. I'm not going to go watch it a second time just to answer more precisely, but it was something along the lines of "characters who get updated". So, ya know, active characters.