Ummmmm it's always been that way....
Not necessarily and not nearly on the scale it is today.
Look at the official dates many non-US school got their ABET accreditation (go to Search By Category and apply Country filters):
www.abet.org
Many of these schools were given ABET-accreditation in the mid to late-2010's and they're now flooding the market, in America.
ABET is a filter for engineer hires and was primarily a US standard saying a school has met the golden seal of approval with regards to education requirements in whatever field of engineering that's being audited. If your engineering degree isn't from an ABET-accredited school, it's basically worth a piece of paper to many companies (unless you went to Stanford, MIT, Cal Tech, those Chinese schools, etc.). It's why we used to say "our engineers are better than the engineers from <this other country>" because they met a qualitative standard (ABET).
Now someone from Brazil, Mexico, Colombia, etc. can graduate from an ABET-accredited international school in their country, meet the same standard and checkmark the same filter (and attend those schools for
free with zero debt).
That competition didn't exist in the mid 2000's because those schools' grads weren't considered as they didn't have that ABET stamp. This is the first generation really dealing with that magnitude of influx of international competition. A lot of our grads are holding STEM degrees with a lot of debt because international talent (with no debt) are getting those jobs.
Some of those schools have only got accredited in 2020's so now anybody graduating after that date has a lot more competition to contend with. Only more international schools will meet that criteria over time as well. Soon enough a lot of those foreigners who have college degrees but are driving Uber and Lyft will have ABET accreditation.