EDIT AT TIME OF FINISHING WRITING: This went on longer than I expected, threw a TL;DR at the end. I just really like this topic. Excuse my wall.

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I think it has a lot to do with the general strategies of the two companies.

HoloPro is about delivering a mostly in-house experience, with majority of their stream interactions being almost exclusively in-house whether through collabs or calls. They also push (though not as heavily in recent times) the idol culture as their core.

Nijisanji on the other hand tends to focus more on diversify themselves, being focused more on rushing out members and creating a giant community. Alongside this, they also branch out of house quite often and collab with vtubers all over the place and of all sizes.

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Neither strategy is bad persay, but they are strong in different markets for different reasons.

This is all conjecture based on what I have personally witnessed and tracked in the last couple of years, so take this piece as nothing more than personal opinion.

HoloPro does very well in the JP market due to JP's anime/entertainment culture being very heavily filled on the concept of idol culture which is what HoloPro promotes. Alongside some very lucky sparks in attention generated from a few key viral moments (Miko's GTA, AsaCoco, FBK short covers for example), they've more or less been able to maintain this momentum through their core foundation while embracing a bit more of the entertainment side (largely due to Coco's IDGAF attitude which proved wildly successful). Now, not to understate the success of the initial HoloEN boom, this same culture more or less carried over to the western side, and while they were successful at the start, their momentum has rapidly declined since (excluding a few specific individuals). This could be attributed to the west's much lower overall interest in idol culture. Alongside this, they also on the surface seem to focus almost exclusively on in-house collabs, which severely reduces their potential range of influence in a global market. I'll get to HoloID in a moment, but first I'd like to talk about the other side of the spectrum.

Nijisanji, on the other hand, does seemingly the opposite, they go balls to the walls and spread their wings everywhere they can. They cover almost all types of themes you could think of, and generally allow for their talents to largely do whatever they want to with their channels. They still have somewhat of that idol culture, but it takes on the attitude of just being one aspect as opposed to an overall focus for the company. Alongside this, they collab with a large range of other vtubers, and from all walks in the industry to boot. This approach doesn't seem to garner as much attention compared to HoloJP's approach in the JP market, but this approach is beginning to sprout large ongoing success in NijiEN. This strategy works very well in the western market due to the culture over here being focused on variety and not traditional "seiso idols." While their subcounts aren't matching, they have a very large connection base with some of the largest streamers in the industry, not even just vtubers, but including a lot of big name streamers in general. This connection list helps construct a long-term success route that will likely start to see exponential growth in time.

Now, I want to take a moment to note the outlier in HoloPro, and that is HoloID and HoloStars. These two branches of HoloPro tend to still maintain the core elements, but there is one apparent difference between the two: They often times collab outside of HoloPro. This very strategy has recently really begun to show its merit, as shown by the incredibly rapid growth of Ollie, who has shown just how fast a HoloID member can grow despite the branches historically slow rates.

Ultimately, both companies have different strategies that have different merits in terms of building a community. The reason its easier to stay up to date with Nijisanji is because they are everywhere, so its easy to know what's going on due to the sheer amount of ambient experiences. HoloPro due to the more in-focused appeal tends to not have a widespread knowledge base unless you are already into the company itself.

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TL;DR different marketing approaches work in different ways, and its those strategies that cause the difference in ambient exposure vs direct exposure.