Well, Dribbble itself is 11 years old so the "dribbblisation" of design as a concept couldn't be older than a decade.
Having said that, the shift in favor of visual/aesthetic designers does seem to be somewhat recent. My impression is that companies scrambled to hire interface designers when good interfaces became a selling point for consumers, which led to a lot of graphic/print/visual/web designers switching over to UX, and some of those designers never got around to learning about the rest of UX. Whatever the reason, there simply seem to be more designers these days who operate as if the most important aspect of a design is how it looks.