It seems like it could have some utility in places where hyperloglog isn’t quite right. YouTube recommendations pointed me at a Numberphile video on this a couple weeks ago:
An interesting corollary of this is that if you only have a single sample, it reduces to indicating that your sample is the median value - i.e. if you see one item with serial number N, you can guess that there were roughly 2N produced.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=WLCwMRJBhuI