This is a good idea but unfortunately by dramatically raising the price of the JR Pass, tourists are now severely discouraged from buying it and from leaving Osaka and Tokyo, and overtourism in these cities is likely to get even worse.
I couldn’t buy one when I was an exchange student in Japan, due to my visa status (granted, that was over a decade ago …) but sibling comments seems to indicate maybe I could today.
It also sounds like you are making money in USD and not yen, so the price of the pass in yen is not important to you, but the price in USD.
To give a further clarifying example, if I were planning to take the shinkansen round-trip between Tokyo and Osaka, the price is JPY 28000. Back when the JPY was stronger, the price of the 7-day pass was JPY 29650, so the pass would have been a no-brainer. Today, even though the 7-day pass costs JPY 50000, the currency is much weaker, so the USD price has increased only a little bit. However, the price of that train trip in JPY has not changed much, if at all. Therefore, because JPY 28000 (USD 184) is significantly less than JPY 50000 (USD 330), it makes no sense at all to buy the pass today if this is the only JR trip I'm planning to make.
That said, the pass is still only for those with a tourist visa (15-90 days for sightseeing), or for Japanese citizens who have lived abroad for at least 10 years.
Others have pointed out the currency conversion, which helps in keeping it affordable. But it's worth pointing out that individual train fares are also priced in JPY, and therefore are also cheaper in USD because of the same currency conversion. Compared to the huge increase in price of the pass, train fares themselves have stayed relatively stable. As a result, while the pass itself may still be affordable to those of us using USD, it's even more likely nowadays that it just makes more sense to pay for the individual train fares than for the pass.
I don't really see the logic behind that myself. Tourists will still travel between those two cities. They will just travel less to other places that they don't prioritise as much.
Now it will cost more to go to Hiroshima+ and so less people will do that.
Also, Asian tourists like the Korean and Chinese influencers named in the article can fly directly KIX, NGO, FUK, CTS, etc. or ferry from Busan, so JRP might be an even worse deal for repeats from those countries.
I priced out a complicated multi-city itinerary for a family visit and even with a lot of long distance trains it basically broke even.
There's lots of things that the JR Pass works for that aren't Shinkansen and they used to add up even if it was just $10/day, and you didn't have to worry about it. Just the Narita Express was $30-40 one way.
With the new pricing... not so much. Just get SUICA unless you're going all the way from Sapporo to Fukuoka and back.