This inspired me to publish a short blog post: https://docs.mergestat.com/blog/2022/01/01/a-year-in-commits

Counting commits, as mentioned, isn't particularly useful as an independent/absolute number - but I think it's an interesting way to see a high level "amount of contribution" relative to other contributors in a codebase. Of course, "commits" as a unit are not normalized, so this is problematic if you're trying to derive some deeper conclusion from counting commits IMO