I wonder if they actually didn't go through a process of resetting targets for GS accounting for the pandemic because of the work involved and theoretical "temporary" nature of these qualification years and instead just looked to see if anyone new qualified via traditional thresholds. No idea what actual work is entailed with the routine process but given that they extended existing GS, and if the process is highly manual, I could see them deciding it's not worth much effort to find a few hundred incremental inductees vs. applying prior year standards.
I do recall last year a few folks getting GS who seemed to have lower spend so also possible they reviewed behavior of those folks and didn't see a compelling return on those GS flyers to warrant a lower threshold this year as well. All purely recreational speculation of course.