Is CWD more or less prevalent than it was in the past? The article fails to even ask this question as you'd expect from the title, it just sort of weaves some other irrelevant wikipedia info into clickbait hysteria.
Deer predators have mostly been eradicated in the contiguous US so that leaves humans and "the rest of nature" to control population density. In some areas (e.g. southwest) the land simply cannot support the density of deer population required for the disease to gain a good foothold in the deer population. In other areas human hunting is what's holding the deer population density down. Hunting has become a lot less popular since the 1950s and 1960s and the available places to do it has also dwindled so once CWD gets in it rapidly expands among the local population. See for example the massive red blotches on the map in the Chicago and DMV areas, places nobody is hunting deer so they're free to breed up to whatever population density the environment can support, a density high enough to permit the spread of a prions disease.
Assuming the current path I would expect to see CWD spread throughout most of the more heavily (deer) populated parts of the US and infect whatever % of the deer population it can given the local population density. There's a lot of untapped potential on the east coast.
In that case, legislation which seems primarily crafted to annoy and alienate gun owners might have the unexpected consequence of increasing the spread of CWD.