I doubt that's what's happening. Maybe I'm deluding myself but seems organic to me.
Discussion
My reading of the chart is that knots is up 4k since the drama/campaign started while core is down 1.5k. That would be 1.5k nodes that switched to knots and 2.5k nodes that got added using knots.
Now if you want to make it look more organic, maybe ask Chainalysis to switch 10k of their nodes to knots? Or in preparation for the next drama, get some 10k IP addresses to point to your core node? 🤔
Check the discrepancy between IPV4 and Tor nodes 😏
Have a chart for only ipv4?
IIRC bitnodes has network based breakdowns
I don't see knots on https://bitnodes.io/dashboard/1y/
Nodes on .onion vs. IP:
.onion grew 26% while IP grew 13%.
Yeah IIRC you have to cross corrolate it with the node version chart. Or you can do a search for knots and count manually by seeing how many pages in the list are Tor nodes.