First place or second place on a list doesn’t matter Endeavour is always number one in our hearts. 
Its rapid rise over the past 18 months doesn’t surprise me. The distribution has a clear focus and doesn’t try to be all things to all people - it does what it does very well - and the community has some of the friendliest and most knowledgable people around.
Endeavour’s position is clear, no question. But I’ve always wondered about MX Linux occupying the first place since ages.
Do you really think distrowatch is a credible site?
What about ninjas??
You can’t see them because of the turkey.
I love how EOS was poised to “take over” so the MX bots went into overdrive to ensure that didn’t happen.
Gee - ninjas already had a rep for being able to jump over things - just imagine a 
ninja! Not to mention materializing out of a pond where no one could be hiding…
It already exists. May I introduce you to Greninja.
only the trend of last month is scary 
It’s one of the most stable and beginner friendly distros out there, it deserves it.
Personally what i would like to see is for DW to categorize ranking via what the distro is based on.
The problem is - what do you consider? Do you classify by base? Or by whether they use systemd? Or…
Even then, MX would be a problem, because it doesn’t use systemd by default, but CAN use it (and does for some things when required). A LOT of work goes into that distro - it’s only failing is the forum usually seems dead (especially compared to here!). I still run one (MX-19 I think) but less use out of it than I expected. Their distro comes with a user manual and other documentation that is easy to use - and only exceeded (in my experience) in volume by the Archwiki. Lots of tough to configure things are present in their repos in a form that just works - and LOTS of things are handled by custom GUI apps. Even conky is handled and GUI accessed with lots of examples - and compiz works there too.
I thought I would like it more than I do - but objectively it is an excellent place to be. Just spoiled by THIS place I guess!
Base. If it’s Ubuntu or Debian or Arch or BSD or whatever? Forget about all the other stuff. This is just for ranking amongst other distro’s with the same base. We are not ranking them based on systemd. I don’t consider MX to be number one amongst Arch based distros. It would be better suited to be judged against it’s peers.
Yeah - it’s a cross with Antix and Debian (I think) but more up-to-date than some - and the kernels can be updated (with a GUI) fairly easily too if you need the newest stuff.
Don’t get me wrong I like MX linux for what it is. It is a bit unique in some respects. I just like rolling and I’m not an lts kernel user. This is one of the reasons i didn’t stick with Manjaro also because it’s always behind. I never had any issues with it being broken when i was using it.