Of course they can. They're expensive to host, and if they're legally scrubbed off of places like huggingface then they are for all practical purposes 'closed' as in unavailable to people who don't already use them and if they're illegal or outpaced by Sota the ones who have copies can't even use them.
Thousands or more people already have copies and the license explicitly is irrevocable and allows redistribution. So if they take it off HF and HF is ok with that, people will just upload to anywhere else.
"outpaced by SOTA" doesn't matter at all, the models we have are plenty good enough for most real tasks.