Neil, thank you so much for your insightful comments!
I was able to use Quarry to get the number of edits on English
Wikipedia yesterday, so I can indeed get recent data from it—hooray!!!
I also used it to cross-check against the REST API for February 28th:
https://quarry.wmflabs.org/query/25783
and I see that Quarry reports 168668 while the REST API reports 169754
edits for the same period (less than 1% error). I'll do some digging
to see if the difference is from the denormalization you mentioned, or
other reasons why they disagree.