What's interesting is that this actually represents the point in time where the NeXT people in charge started to realize that they didn't know everything and stopped resenting the idea that some of the classic Mac ideas were actually valuable to developers.
Prior to 10.3, there was no really adequate built-in replacement for some use cases of the classic Mac OS Resource Manager. You either compiled sqlite into your Mac app or used some often inferior solution. Sometimes plists were better! Sometimes really not, even with all of the limits of the classic Resource Manager.
Yes, I know this is humor (and as an sqlite fan, I got a good chuckle).
Other have pointed out the spurious correlation issue, but there's also the difficulty of viewing growth data on a linear scale. Switching to a logarithmic scale makes 2004 a less obvious inflection point between no growth and rapid growth.
Prior to 10.3, there was no really adequate built-in replacement for some use cases of the classic Mac OS Resource Manager. You either compiled sqlite into your Mac app or used some often inferior solution. Sometimes plists were better! Sometimes really not, even with all of the limits of the classic Resource Manager.