It feels older to me, too. It definitely gained a lot of momentum recently around Reddit's recent API pricing changes, but Google Trends shows it having a lot of interest in 2004 and then sporadic interest over the years.

https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=e...

I don't use Google Trends enough to know how to interpret that data, so maybe there's some quirk of Google Trends that makes it look more significant back then.

It would be awesome if some service had a similar feature to Google Ngram Viewer, but for content on the internet instead of books. Search interest isn't quite the same as how much it's being written in content.