I think somewhere a bean counter realized that the airline was solvent because they were selling frequent flier miles, and started looking for other things they could sell, and realized they can sell EQM too.

Seems to be a resulting trend towards making it harder to make elite by actually flying in favor of making you use the airline-affiliated credit card/car rental company/etc to make elite. Then they don't even have to bother flying you anywhere to get money for the EQMs!