It's been around for quite a long time though. Neural nets themselves have seen multiple hype cycles now. See the history of CIFAR.
I would maybe rephrase this as "Machine learning really just became mainstream recently and now everyone wants in".
If you are talking about say: recruiters, they will always tend to piggy back on buzz words. They don't really learn the technology themselves. Requiring a phd and some of these other things that are being talked about is a general "data science problem".
I can't count how many candidates I've seen applying to companies that got turned down for jobs because they just went through the traditional HR funnel. Your best bet as I said earlier is just to network.
The worst parts of getting a deep learning job are the same ones that plague every tech position out there.
