There are a lot of factors that people for some reason don't even think about. By the way, you can also add a whole army of
trading bots that don't play but just spin and trade cases and other things continuously through Steam. They don't even launch games, they just play the "Valve Best Game ever Made = Cases", but it's better not to even go there.
This is like creating a topic every time about Google breaking another record for the number of accounts. (How Many People Use Gmail? Gmail has over 1.8 billion active users globally, accounting for approximately 21.95% of the world's population).
But how many real people are playing at the moment, these are really interesting figures. But we will never know the exact figures, they are extremely difficult to calculate without direct access to the database, and Valve is unlikely to publish them openly, there are no reasons for this.