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I think what we're seeing is that drivers who can't make it into F1 have their eyes on sports car racing due to higher profile championships.
In the WEC you can be a World Champion now. That's instantly going to get a young driver's attention. I can also see the appeal of the two Blancpain series to young drivers - if you've been brought up on single-make championships, you'll probably like the combination of a BoP formula with cool, powerful GT cars.
The ladder for drivers is extremely conflated these days, but the F3/FR3.5/GP2/LMP2/GTE-PRO/LMP1 sort of route seems to be one of the more obvious ones.
Another factor is that there's an incredible amount of stability in the F1 driver market which means new seats are like gold-dust. Just look at the amount of previous World Champions on the grid. That's partly due to the modern safety of the sport, but also because a lot of them still feel like that they have something left to prove, not to mention the fact them some of them are very young multiple WCs with no plans of retirement on the horizon.
So with a stagnant F1 driver market, the increasing profile of sports cars, and with series like DTM and IndyCars being how they are...I guess that with hindsight, this trend was inevitable.
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