100 edits a month does indeed have the disadvantage that all edits are not equal, there may be some people for whom that represents 100 hours contributed, others a single hour. So an individual month could be inflated by something as trivial as a vandalfighting bot going down for a couple of days and a bunch of oldtimers responding to a call on IRC by coming back and running huggle for an hour.
But 7 months in a row where the total is higher than the same month the previous year looks to me like a pattern.
Across the 3,000 or so editors on English wikipedia who contribute over a hundred edits per month there could be a hidden pattern of an increase in Huggle, stiki and AWB users more than offsetting a decline in manual editing, but unless anyone analyses that and reruns those stats on some metric such as "unique calender hours in which someone saves an edit" I think it best to treat this as an imperfect indicator of community health. I'm not suggesting that we are out of the woods - there are other indicators that are still looking bad, and I would love to see a better proxy for active editors. But this is good news.