I think this preemptive compliance has a lot to do with a lot of low-level open source development now being a regular day-job at a large tech company. So, you have people writing code who are embedded in an infrastructure with managers, performance targets, and the corporate culture associated with that, and where compliance with whatever the corporate hierarchy demands is the norm.
This is a very different situation when you compare that to entrepreneurs and academics like Phil Zimmermann and djb, who didn't preemptively comply with export control laws.