I paid $488 in 2019 for a 14 day JR pass. In 2024, the same pass is $60 more. I wouldn't call that a dramatic increase, and still within the same magnitude of affordability?
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.