i’m not a scientist, but i went to https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/published-papers-that-use-inaturalist-data-wiki-3-2022-and-2023/34753 just to see if i could find any that cite a GBIF download rather than iNat directly.
just occasionally opening up some of the papers listed there, i couldn’t actually find any that cited GBIF. (i gave up after looking through 10-15 of these.)
some of the papers cited specific observations. maybe these were undescribed and so couldn’t flow to GBIF. some of the papers cited specific iNat projects, which might be hard to translate exactly to a GBIF download.
i’m not doubting that making data available in GBIF makes it more available to scientists, but i’m seeing plenty of cases of people using data directly from iNaturalist.