Seems like a bit of survivor bias at play too in that narrative. Don’t pretty much all languages start off that way?
Going from very large to even larger still may be a much lower rate of increase.
Never let the facts get the way of a good headline?
But I'd assume that most are just used by their creators.
If you use absolute rates of growth, following a linear curve, no, that's bullshit.
The article has no numbers, but appears very strongly to use the second definition.
I'm not sure what an "absolute rate" (of growth) is, can you explain?
Aren't growth rates usually (always?) expressed as a percentage change of a variable over time? How could that be anything other than relative?
If something grows from 1 to 2 it doubled.
If something grows from 100 to 101 its growth was 1%.
In absolute terms it's the same amount.
So you got it backwards.