I’ve perceived an increase in the number of newborn nodes syncing the blockchain from my nodes. Maybe after the Chainalysis video showed the privacy risks of using remote nodes over clearnet, more people are setting up their own nodes.

If you run your own node, you can make a get_connections call to monerod’s unrestricted RPC port (18081 by default) to get data on the sync status of your peer nodes. I wrote a little script to display this info if anyone is interested.