My first digital camera was a Sony compact that would only take Sony Memory Sticks - one of those 12 slots you mentioned. I got tired of paying twice as much for half the memory of standard cards, so I made sure my next camera took SD.

Kodak was always a big player in the camera business, but they did it to increase the film business - they wanted people taking and printing as many pictures as possible, because that's where the real money was. It's hard today to imagine the scale of that business. And that's the problem, if Kodak had sold every single sensor that went into every single digital camera, it wouldn't have been enough to save them.

It's interesting to contrast the reaction of Kodak to that of the other big film company Fujifilm when the market for film cratered. https://petapixel.com/2018/10/19/why-kodak-died-and-fujifilm...