Oops, clicked the SEND button accidentally. Sorry! You can ignore it.

Ah! That reminds me that OP(of this thread) should also aim to fix #8786 along with that could enable such a counting technique for Pluggable transports.

Now coming to the main point,

...

In addition, each user doesn’t necessarily correspond to a different IP because of NAT, and so counting connections may actually be more accurate.

I agree,