Piefed has gone from being rarely if ever even mentioned at all to, in just the last few days, being mentioned hundreds if not thousands of times a day in threads on virtually any topic, makes me highly suspicious.

You make interesting points, but for this specific thing, it almost certainly has to do with the .ee shutdown which was announced just a few days ago, apparently PieFed has fantastic comm transfer tooling so that's why it's probably been exploding in discussions since .ee has a number of large comms that are trying to figure out their next steps