here are a couple of related discussions:
- https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/unintended-cascading-of-establishment-means/7299
- https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/improve-community-curation-tools-for-introduced-native-status/720
besides what’s mentioned in the above discussions, i bet that in a lot of cases when places are created by the community nowadays, those places don’t really need checklists, but few people ever uncheck the “allow checklists?” box when they create their places. so you get a ton of community places that get establishment means records when they are cascaded from a parent place. i bet this could be reduced by defaulting “allow checklists?” to unchecked, or limiting making the cascade configurable to descendant standard places only (default) or all descendant places.