It is when the competitions are aimed at the machine learning practitioning public, and not companies themselves. If having a machine with a bare minimum of $30

It is when the competitions are aimed at the machine learning practitioning public, and not companies themselves. If having a machine with a bare minimum of $3000 of GPU power is the entry point for having a competitive model, then most of these competitions aren't actually a matter of coming up with a unique and clever model. It's simply throwing the biggest neural network you can at it. Which is fine, but it definitely flies in the face of the perception of Kaggle.