Not defending Kalshi but stock market has been gambling lite for a while now. It is pretty wild how blatant it is now though.

I think it was kind of a chain reaction... gambling liberalization and bitcoin happened around the same time, and then people figured out "Oh this thing we do with buying bitcoin and then talking everybody else into buying bitcoin... we can just do that with regular securities can't we" and then the hyper-valuation of Tesla and Gamestop happened.

Now everything is either gambling or a scam or both.