Nope. You're overthinking it. There are only so many people available to apply each year. Press reports of a so-called "Fauci Effect" creating thousands of additional people interested in a career in medicine, and magically being ready to apply in 3 months, were vastly overstated.
Reduced EC opportunities impacted everyone equally, and are not causing people to push back applications. Hours will be lower across the board, and med schools will accept it, because we are being compared to each other, not to some arbitrary metric. Moreover, someone like me, who has been working diligently for years, would have plenty of hours, albeit a lot less than if things weren't shut down between spring 2020 and winter 2021. If you were right, there would be no first time applicants this cycle.
The marginal person who put things off until the last minute (that was me last cycle!
) would not cause a measurable drop in total applications. After all, EC opportunities have been available, both in person and virtually, for almost a year now.
As you said, the pandemic induced a ton of people to apply who otherwise would have waited because they had no visibility into whether or when things would open back up. In hindsight, all that did was push applications forward from this cycle to last. That cannot go on indefinitely, and this year is just the snap back.
In fact, I happen to think the only reason applications are elevated at all over 2 years ago is on account of an abnormally large number of reapplicants, due to the fact that the acceptance rate was so low last year. I don't have numbers to back this up, but I'd be shocked if the number of first time applicants wasn't very close to where it was 2 years ago, if not below, depending on just how many applications were pulled forward last year.
