Badges for community moderation are neat because the key that awards the badges can be any key you want:

Your own community key, a hot-key on a server, someone else that already did/does the work of curating acceptable people in a way you like, ....

Communities can start by manually awarding Badges (I.e. access to parts of their community) and switch to a more automated hot-key signing flow later, if needed.

The only missing part for Badges in the current NIP is a way to request them. For this, I think Forms are the way.