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A few more context points that are missing:

0. Wounds were allocated in the round: all the shooting/melee was stacked up and then the owning player distributed it around the unit so that every model took a wound before another model took its second and so forth.

Consequently a 200 point character could happily wade into combat secure in the knowledge that he'd only be lightly tapped by any chainswords or lasguns whilst his potentially 20 model entourage was pasted around him from all the actual dangerous stuff. It cannot be overstated how powerful this was ; dumping points into characters was perfectly sensible because they would survive, and in Chaos' case usually make the points of the unit back on their own.

1. Codex SM had to pay out the nose for power weapons; The cheapest you could get, with 2 attacks on a sgt was in the region of 35; compared to the 20 pt blood letter who came in squads and did not need a transport or ablative wounds. Chaos Champions on the other hand did not need to be upgraded to access the armory.

2. Melee in general was very very expensive even for armies that relied on it. C:SM had a trump card in the form of Furious Charge potentially in every slot; 3~ points for +1 str +1 Initiative, which combined with their plethora of options meant equivalent points of CC experts against them would die before they got a chance to strike back.

3. Master crafted Spikey bits. From what I remember, these two upgrades together costed 5 points for a single wound model. This gave two rerolls to hit, and could apply to power weapons. Rerolls existed *only* for chaplains at that point, and were a pretty big deal just for one squad. An entire army of characters that could do this with ablative wounds could define a game.

4. Power weapons just flat out ignored armour saves.

All of the above meant that :

An alpha legion master crafted spikey bit cultist champion ( for example) which would cost about 50 for the champion and 30~ for 9 ablative wounds could take on a 240 pt terminator unit from infiltrate and expect to win. This was very emblematic of the codex; hard counters to everything for cheap, and you could feasibly fit one of everything in.

5. Predators specifically and vehicles in general were somewhat relevant with the various upgrades they could take, ignoring 1/3rd of the vehicle damage results.

6. Objectives were defined by table quarters instead of specific points on the table. As such the quality of shooting was a big deal as you had to focus on all the units in the area instead of just the ones camping. This more than anything else is why the iron warriors shennanigans was such a big deal : they were perfectly optimised to score, and no-one could get the same guns for the same price.

7. Base CSM marines were flat out cheaper

They were 'Better Space Marines'. They had better characters when characters were a big deal, better options when choosing drawback <->advantage, and a wider variety of drawback <-> advantage to adapt to the regional meta.

Consequently when I started in early 4th, some 2/3rds of my meta were CSM players.