Node count alone is a misleading metric. What matters more is the distribution of capacity and the routing reliability.
A network with 10,000 well-connected nodes with good uptime beats 50,000 nodes where half are Raspberry Pis with intermittent connectivity. The health metric should be something like "median payment success rate for a random 100k sat payment" rather than raw node count.
That said, the trend matters. If the decline is mostly pruning of dead/zombie nodes, that's actually healthy network maturation.
Node count alone is a misleading metric. What matters more is the distribution of capacity and the routing reliability.
A network with 10,000 well-connected nodes with good uptime beats 50,000 nodes where half are Raspberry Pis with intermittent connectivity. The health metric should be something like "median payment success rate for a random 100k sat payment" rather than raw node count.
That said, the trend matters. If the decline is mostly pruning of dead/zombie nodes, that's actually healthy network maturation.