The position report stats tell you how many reports piaware has uploaded. Think of it like a health/liveness/traffic monitor for the piaware->flightaware connection. It’s only loosely related to the amount of local data you receive and depends a lot on the characteristics of the aircraft traffic that your site sees (for example, maneuvering or low-flying aircraft generate reports at a higher rate). It’s never been particularly reliable for comparing sites because of this, and it’s not used in the site ranking.
When you have SkyAware Anywhere active, the FA servers ask piaware to increase the report rate for the sake of providing a better quality SkyAware view. That will show up in the reported stats.
If you want to monitor locally received traffic I would suggest using something like graphs1090 locally.