If you make your large payments with a credit card you can both rack up awards and avoid the need to file a 1099-misc.

Some vendors only accept check or paypal since they don't have a merchant account to accept credit cards, so this isn't a complete workaround.

Is the marketplace required to issue the 1099-MISC if the threshold for the 1099-K is not met if all payments are done via credit card? I'm guessing the answer is "no" but the blog post isn't quite clear on that.

No. Using Balanced, the marketplace isn't responsible for submitting any 1099 forms; Balanced is. So if the merchant hasn't hit the $20K/200 trnxs threshold they simply won't receive a 1099 from either the marketplace or Balanced.

Specifically, I'm curious how online marketplaces like Etsy, Taskrabbit, and Airbnb handle this problem.