I think it's been like this for the last couple of years or more, actually. Somebody dug up the numbers for the initial batches of pinch hits on FFA and this year wasn't overlong by recent standards. (46 hours to claim 40 pinch hits this year vs 36 hours to claim 34 last year and 55 hours to claim 38 in 2021.) Yuletide pinch hits still go way faster than most but the days of them all immediately disappearing before you can dive in to try to claim one are probably further in the past than it feels like.

(Honestly, I partly blame the switch to Google Groups, which probably saw some general attrition of the number of people following the list, especially since Google makes you jump through slightly more hoops than Yahoo did, requiring an account instead of just an email address and not having a functioning RSS feed any more. So in some cases people may just be taking more time to even find out there are pinch hits up.)