I believe it, but I already did not trust those numbers for a different reason - e.g. I abandoned my account there six months ago to come to where I am at now, so technically I have an account and yet I've been there like 6 times since then and commented or interacted fewer than that.
Still, the total user count represents a "high mark" that it had once reached, and the Mbins collectively still seem far away from that. But good point, b/c how many accounts are e.g. alts or deleted from Mbin successfully but from Kbin that request gets ignored.
"Activity" would be a better measurement. Down below in some of the other replies we looked into that, and I think technically Kbin.Social is still fairly active, more so than the Mbins, but overall the Mbins are obviously in a healthier state with fewer of these insanely long (weeks-long) outages.
Btw, in my link above (for "sick"), Ernst mentioned that:
The care of the instance will also be handed over.
So it looks like things will change at Kbin.Social regardless of his health & life issues.