Possibly because the Gnome project has announced a Flatpak-based distribution (if I got that right anyway), which would have brought Flatpak prominently to people's minds again.
well, that distribution is for a gnome-devs only, isn't it? it does not have a normal package manager at all as I understood
Haven't taken a look (gnome sucks) but to me flatpak based just means its an atomic/immutable distro.