A bit of both (it finds new things and news is hyped/blown up), and a third factor is that more people are trying to find things. The authors might have been able to do this already, because you still need to have a decent understanding to get useful work out of it and verify the results, but the shiny new toy and FOMO factors make people spend more hours on it that they'd have spent doing something else otherwise

I've seen quite a few saying that they were inspired by the previous report that is presented as "the model pointed us to it" and you get FOMO about missing out if you don't snatch bugs now as well