I remember a comment somewhere, where employees of a company, would open a CVE for a piece that they use in their job, to force an upgrade of said software since normal update request has been denied despite having business reasons to do so. So, the number doesn't matter.
Also, the linux kernel assigns CVE for anything that can be though as a vulnerability:
> Note, due to the layer at which the Linux kernel is in a system, almost any bug might be exploitable to compromise the security of the kernel, but the possibility of exploitation is often not evident when the bug is fixed. Because of this, the CVE assignment team is overly cautious and assign CVE numbers to any bugfix that they identify. This explains the seemingly large number of CVEs that are issued by the Linux kernel team
Also, the linux kernel assigns CVE for anything that can be though as a vulnerability:
> Note, due to the layer at which the Linux kernel is in a system, almost any bug might be exploitable to compromise the security of the kernel, but the possibility of exploitation is often not evident when the bug is fixed. Because of this, the CVE assignment team is overly cautious and assign CVE numbers to any bugfix that they identify. This explains the seemingly large number of CVEs that are issued by the Linux kernel team
In other words, the number is fake
In other words, the method of assigning CVEs hasn't changed, but the number of CVEs has risen sharply.