I've had limited dealings with the FAA but my overall impression is they struggle to deal with change.
They don't handle medical certifications well—God help you if you take an antidepressant and want to fly a plane, they failed on the 5G-radio altimeter issue, they can't approve a leadless fuel despite having one that passes all their tests and meets their standards, and now this.
And I'd argue it does not benefit the elderly, it benefits everyone. Instead of having to find and pay a hundred bucks to a medical examiner every two years I can now accomplish this by having a chat with my primary physician, which I see anyway, every four years. I think it's hugely beneficial to all recreational pilots.
But you're right in that the FAA had to be forced to do it.
That date is exactly 10 years before congress passed the Basic Med law, so when basic med was new, it was "in the last 10 years", but the law pinned it to a specific date, not a specific number of years in the past.
[1]: https://www.faa.gov/licenses_certificates/airmen_certificati...
Having ever been diagnosed with ADHD is disqualifying, as is taking any ADHD/psychotropic medication to mitigate the condition. All you can do is take a day-long battery of psych tests to demonstrate that you never had ADHD in the first place.
Well, probably. The FAA is the accident investigation authority on the US, if anyone has that chart, it's them. (I know I don't have that information, but last time I worked on a safety related area (not on the US), and worked into getting a relation of causes for accidents, almost no cause had enough accidents linked to it to do any kind of analysis.)
I am personally against strict regulation for general aviation, but most of the eVTOL isn't general aviation (I'm not sure why people are lumping it there).