Not my recollection, though? "Electronica" was a mainstream record store category and a huge market in the late 90s and early 2000s in North America long before this "EDM" label was applied later.
I think, yes, that it fell out of fashion post 9-11 and so in the 10 year gap the EDM thing happened later. So we're really talking about a generational horizon thing here, where EDM was the re-emergence of the mainstream top-40 "rave" thing 10 years later for the next generation.
But I remember 3 waves of this stuff:
very early 90s, late 80s, crap like C&C music factory, etc. was the mainstreamization of house music. "pump up the volume" KLF "What Time is Love" etc. was chart topping mainstreamization of acid house, hell it got played all the time on the jukebox in my smalltown / rural Canadian high school. I worked an indoor mall amusement park and the early 90s equivalent of today's EDM was on constant rotation. Dance megamixes, etc.
mid-late 90s, "Electronica"; Chemical Brothers, Prodigy, Underworld, etc. were big. And then the tail end of that it just was everywhere.
And then later, this EDM thing.
So 10 year waves, and at no point has it really been foreign to North America. There were huge several thousand person raves all through the late 90s. It's just that in _context_ of hip-hop R&B dominance in North America and its exports, maybe it looks to Europeans as non-existent.