Bots, likely. Internet bots are out of control, wasting people’s precious time and energy.

My other guess is a stretch: your project was added to a new collection that includes very popular projects, and yours was suggested on the others’ download pages. But then it would be extremely odd that no one out of almost a thousand views responded by downloading or adding your project to their own collection.

Apparently google is bugged and several itch creators observed similar issues. It happened to me too.