The counting did more than shrink a number. It broke several assumptions that are still repeated.
The trials were not medieval. The heaviest prosecution falls in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, overlapping the Renaissance, the Reformation and the beginnings of the scientific revolution, not the age of cathedrals. The Middle Ages, for most of their length, held officially that the night flight was a dream.
They were not principally run by the Inquisition. The Spanish Inquisition largely stopped prosecuting witchcraft after 1614, and the Roman and Portuguese tribunals executed very few. The great majority of executions were the work of ordinary secular courts, and the territories with the highest totals are generally those where small local jurisdictions could try and execute without review by a higher court. Strong central review reduced the numbers wherever it existed, which is an uncomfortable finding for several popular accounts at once.
They were not evenly spread. A large share of all European executions falls in the German-speaking lands of the Holy Roman Empire, with intense episodes elsewhere and long periods in which large countries prosecuted almost nobody. England, where judicial torture was not part of ordinary criminal procedure, has totals a small fraction of Scotland's, and Scotland's a small fraction of some German territories.
And the people executed were not witches. That is not a delicate way of saying the evidence was weak. It is the settled position of the field.