This seems like survivorship bias. Kaggle was pretty well-positioned to do what Hugging Face is doing (and in fact, they are trying now somewhat). There's also a lot of others that tried to build a marketplace for AI models and failed.
Kaggle is trying too many things at the same time. It's confusing. If you confuse, you lose.
Kaggle always was a place to conpete in data science contests to me. I never associated it with anything else. If they did sell ML models they did a horrible job letting people know about it
I don't disagree. My point is that Hugging Face did what others could have done. I don't think it was just luck.