The first documented case the OED tracked was in a letter from 1918 in the Journal of American History (the journal article published in 1995). "You low-down Mother Fuckers can put a gun in our hands but who is able to take it out?" By 1956, a linguist in American Speech said "The linguistic vacuum is being filled by a new obscenity symbol, mother-fucker."

Popularity is a tricky issue. generally, taboo and vulgar words either wither with non-use and lose their meaning, or frequent use makes us desensitized and we search out new, more shocking words to replace them (hence the linguistic vacuum; consider the old vulgarity of fuck and the new vulgarity of cunt in common American English).

I'd probably have to go to the COCA (Corpus of Contemporary American English) to look for usage spikes, but I suspect popularity is somewhat helped by widespread and popular sources -- "Make one move, motherfucker, and I'll blow you away."

I think "mother insults" are ubiquitous no? I haven't researched this, but here's a link with many "your mother" jokes.

With an international lens, I recalled the Turkish curse I learned from my family: "I shit on the soul of your mother", and I located a few others along those lines like, "my dick in your mother's rib cage" (Arabic), or "I shit in/on your whore mother" (Spanish), or "your mother sucks bears in the forest" (Bulgaria), or more inclusively, "fuck the 18 generations of your ancestors" (Mandarin). Icelanders had a similar curse, but for the male: "Grandfatherfucker", along with "corpsefucker", "sheepfucker" and "unclefucker".

So, given this context, "motherfucker" seems typical and consistent with curses and swears generally.