Regardless of whether or not we like the views counter now or not- it was a bad change. sales have noticeablely gone down since that change. its cause and effect.
Ebay has stated that their search algorithms in part consider listing views to determine how relevant an item is and how to place it in the search ranking. We have most likely all seen this borne out when an item sells and then it gets more and more views until it is sold out. Momentum is key and a record of that is essential.
Ebay has also stated that high views and no sales is looked at as a negative- meaning lots of people "look" but not buy- the assumption is that there is something wrong with the item or its priced too high , so the algorithm will lower the placement in search moving forward. The search relies on views.
The moral of the story is that it looks like ebay changed how it counts views BUT for got to tell the algorithm team to removed that requirement from the algorithm so now the search AI has no idea why all the listings "look" bad and is just running amuck.
Unfortunately i think this is a case of "tech" people thinking that AI can do a better job than just showing people what they type in the search box...... but obvious to the rest of us that actually use ebay to search....that is not the case- we long for the old days when you could find what you were looking for easily and without having to leave the site to go to google to find ebay listings....
