Maybe? For years the highest selling EV was the Leaf.

I agree Tesla kind of increased the desirability of EVs at least in the US, but I'm not convinced it wouldn't have happened anyway.

It's a hard question to answer, because you're talking about a counterfactual.

I feel like there's probably some broader type of cognitive bias at play (where we assume something common wouldn't have been common otherwise, because it is common) but I don't know what the term for it might be.