Thanks. I didn't know MELPA had download counts, now I do. But there is nothing in `list-packages' that hints at this, really, it's just a list of packages.

It's kinda hard to miss it.

The person who wrote the article managed this easily enough. Emacs packages also interact with each other (e.g., completion minor modes and language major modes, things like flycheck). I still think there's a fair amount of uncertainty about what packages one should install, and that projects like https://github.com/bbatsov/prelude are really helpful in this regard.