No, the configuration option has been available for a very long time, and there had been some users already that generally accepted transactions even with zero fees. The big change was that suddenly miners started confirming transactions below 1 s/vB, which lead to the default value for minRelayTxFee to be changed in Bitcoin Core 29.1 and Bitcoin Core 30.0.

The average transaction fees per block were about 0.03 BTC in the past week, or about 0.9% of the total block reward.