That depends on what you define as "popular". The game that has the most players? The game that has in absolute numbers the most ratings? Or the game - and that was probably meant here - that has the overall best average ratings with a certain minimum number for ratings given (which is what I suspect the "weighted rating" here does)?
Also Cari's latest updates were generally regarded well by pretty much everybody who already liked the game in the first place. Not like the last two BaD updates for example, that weren't that well received by a sizeable number of longtime players.
I define popularity as to how many people know about the title outside of places where they have a dedicated fanbase/following. BaDIK, for instance, is known even outside F95 and Itch.io due to its heavy presence on Steam and its large following on Patreon. Compare that to Eternum where, despite its ratings outshining BaDIK here and on Itch, isn't exactly known or played by many (at least, when you compare it to the likes of BaDIK or even StS).
I mean, it's basically the difference between, say, something like BOTW and Genshin Impact. The former is more critically-acclaimed and is a GOTY to some people. But the latter is a lot more well-known and a lot more popular (
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compared to
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) despite being basically a derivative of the former.
So yeah, higher ratings doesn't necessarily mean that it's more popular than the other.
