I completely agree with you. I think it would be nice to have in IPB v5 more freedom for customization in this kind of thing.
The number of views of a piece of content (in public) may be useful in supportive discussions, but not in a community talking about frogs or TV series, I think it is more important the engagement value that discussion creates, example how "hot" appears when it is very active.
As in my suggestion below, why would visitors and users care how many people clicked on that link?
Maybe it would be nice to create an "appreciation" system to the topic, other than reactions, something like Steam did. Create a Gamification system, it would help entice a community to be more active and perhaps indicate there the number of "Rewards" given within that topic, which is different from badges, since here users assign them to each other, giving each other points and awards that they have counted in their "inventory," so there is no spam of randomly assigned rewards.
In that case we have a true value in the list of topics: That discussion has had posts with lots of acknowledgements from the community inside, so it has good content inside.