Seeing if I can reply here from the other topic as it seems more relevant here…
I don’t really know for certain how Fibery team is tracking this stuff. I do have a Discourse instance integrated with Fibery though, as a test, and I can tell you that it has a column in the “Topics” table and what it shows is total hearts in the entire thread. I think that may be new information to the discussion here, so think about it for a moment…
Presumably this is either A: because this is what Discourse exposes in their API, B: this is what Fibery implemented because it was easiest, or C: this is what Fibery team did because they felt it was most useful/representative as sort of aggregate of positive sentiment toward overall content of this topic’s subject and ongoing discussion. I can see it being somewhat inaccurate in certain respects, and some might argue that hearts on the 1st post should have more weight, or that the hearts on replies might be misleading (e.g. if a reply strongly disagrees with the topic starter and many people then support that person’s disagreement).
But in general I think they probably use this “hearts column” in some way in their feedback weighting process. My guess though is that it is probably not a direct 1:1 addition to feedback “weight”, they may divide by some other factors, such as number of replies or something. And they may also weight their own highlighted/linked content from the forums more highly too.
Now of course some more transparency in exactly how they weight feedback from the forums vs. other things would be nice for us forum denizens. I think in fact this is the principle concern being expressed here and in other threads like Suggestion: 
Canny or other alternative for roadmap/feature requests I think a more clear way of showing Discourse-specific “feedback weight” in Discourse would be nice, but even without that I do feel confident that forum feedback is taken into account through this integration, and it seems to provide enough detail that there is no technical reason why that would not be the case.
Having said all that, I do think the topic voting plugin we’ve discussed could provide some clarity in certain cases where hearts don’t necessarily do quite that job (e.g. in the example problem case I described above). Notably that would be in the area of providing more clarity to forum viewers and voters. But the current Voting plugin also has some potentially annoying limitations. Anyway, I would be in support of it being tried here, but I don’t see it as being dramatically better than what they have.
Bottom line I hope you will feel a bit less uncertain and anxious about how and whether feedback is being taken into account here. They have an integration directly into their feedback and dev management system, itself implemented of course in Fibery. And it provides basically all the relevant Discourse data to be prioritized and actionable. We will still see seeming disconnects between our priority here in the forums and what is actually worked on, of course.