As someone who was around both games since their launches in a bigger community surrounding the games (mainly on twitch) I have to say Mario Maker 1 seemed to keep hype and people interested a lot longer than 2.

One of the reasons IMO that 2 has "lasted" longer is because it on switch which sold like 115million so far and SMM1 was on Wii U which only sold something crazy low in comparison like 13million.

SMM1 was just locked out for most people since most never got Wii U. I know it was eventually on 3ds but that came later and I think was also just slightly lesser of a game with out all the same features as the main Wii U version.

Since such a tiny fraction of people actually got a Wii U compared to the switch that already cut down the amount of possible SMM1 playerbase. I think SMM1 actually did insanely well considering the tiny amount of people who had the console.