alt Hacker NewsExecutive Orders are a common practice across presidencies, not just the current and previous: https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/statistics/data/executive-or...
Whether that’s abuse or not I am not equipped to say with any confidence. I’d be curious to understand why you think this particular case is one of abusing executive authority and when an EO might not be such a case?
Well of course as you point out, EOs have gone from single digits, to double-digits, to thousands, and now down to hundreds per POTUS.
Contextually, I think it's a very reasonable (and commonly held, in the academic world) take that the EOs have also gotten far more legislative and legal. This is partly (but only partly) owing to administrative deference delegated by congress.
It's also somewhat specific to technological innovations, which some EOs have sought to occupy the field on before the lumbering process of congress can respond. And it's not limited to published EOs either, but many executive actions, especially in the White House OLC. This was very obvious during the W. Bush administration as regards the (Lotus Domino) email system in place at that time (which was the topic of my thesis, so it kinda serves as a temporal landmark in my consideration of this issue, but I do genuinely think it was a new frontier in executive overreach and obfuscation of interests in terms of how the White House has approached its interactions with the internet).