Even so. I read a lot of reports about educational policy (and occasionally produce them) and even if there are only 2-3 major decision makers you'd expect the report to be read by various cabinet members of those decision makers, by committee members in parliament, by academics, by other teams or colleagues or institutions that would have liked to write the report in your stead or that produce "competing" reports, by folks at think tanks, and by journalists and politicians in general. Because the executive summary is almost always inlined in these kinds of reports, the intended audience is generally quite broad. I'm not saying that attaining only a couple hundred downloads of a report necessarily show that money was wasted on superfluous research, but it definitely can be an indicator of waste.

I think this is one of those things where you can really overthink it and convince yourself that "the report was read only once, by the one person who had to read it" is an ideal outcome, but really it isn't.