While we working the release, I had a look at how many hints we have deployed during buster like I did for wheezy a few years back. As it seemed we were using a lot fewer hints than previously and I decided to take a detour into “stats-land”. 
When I surfaced from “stats-land”, I confirmed that we have a clear decline in hints in the past two releases[1].
wheezy: 3301 jessie: 3699 (+398) stretch: 2408 (-1291) buster: 1478 (-930)
While it is certainly interesting, the number of hints on its own is not really an indicator of how much work we put into the release. Notably, it says very little about the time spent on evaluating unblock requests before adding the hint.
[1]
Disclaimer: This are very rough estimate based on same method as from the previous blog post using entire complete months as smallest time unit. It is apparently not very accurate either. The observant reader will note that the number for wheezy does not match the number I posted years ago (3254 vs 3301). I am not entirely sure what causes the difference as I am using the same regex for wheezy and mtime for the files look unchanged.