The report about models growing from 63 to 668 on OpenRouter between 2024 and 2025 tracks a trend, it doesn't explain the mechanism.
Just logging numbers is a common failure mode when trying to understand causality; the tracker is not the driver.
For example, my monitoring tool can show a server's CPU usage increased, but it doesn't tell me why that happened—it could be a new process, a software update, or a database query gone wild.
You have to look beyond the observation to the actual input variables to find the weakest link.