OK let me slip this back to Support if you think it’s also happening on other Discourse sites. I haven’t heard anyone else ask about this before and I have not experienced it myself anywhere but on meta, but this is the biggest public site that I participate in. I get nice share badges fairly consistently so I am not seeing a particular uptick for myself.
It would be nice to have a report to see trends over time with the awarding of badges. I had a quick look and didn’t immediately find a data explorer query for it.