Something I'm starting to wonder is if the tooling in the factory in Indonesia isn't quite dialled in, or has drifted out of spec in recent months.
When I was building my own guitars, I made a problem for myself early on where I was trying to cut fretboards to such tight tolerances that the fret tangs would make contact on all three sides of the fret slots. I thought it would help to transfer more of the string's energy through the fret and fretboard into the neck and body. Maybe I was right? It was all just hypothetical at that point.
But what I learned in that process is it made the frets really susceptible to tiny changes in the fretboard wood. With regular fret slotting that cuts the slots a little deeper than necessary, a little shift in humidity in the fretboard wood squeezes the frets from the sides. You might see a shift in neck relief, but the frets would largely not shift.
However… a bit of shrinking or swelling from the sides and the bottom of the fret slot, and you're squeezing the fret tang and also pushing it up from below. I had a client who had to keep getting fretwork done on the upper frets because they kept creeping up. Totally my mistake in trying to be clever and push the limits a bit, and the guitar that travelled from Toronto to California and then to Europe just couldn't settle down.
So this is purely conjecture, but I'm starting to wonder if some of the fret sprout issue we're starting to hear about is the fret slots not being cut deep enough. Maybe the fret saws are wearing out? Maybe the slotting jig is a little off? Maybe there's too much wood being sanded off the face of the fretboard after the slots are cut? It doesn't take much for the fret tangs to bottom out in the slots. And they might look good when they leave the factory, but if that wood expands or shrinks a tiny amount, it could wreak havoc across the fretboard.
But that's what my money is on. It's not like people are having necks with unfixable forward or backward bow or twisting like you'd expect from improperly dried wood. This is a fret installation issue. Either the fretwire isn't being radiused properly, or the frets aren't being installed properly, or maybe the fret slots aren't deep enough and the frets are rebounding out of the slot with humidity changes.
I don't know. But that's my current guess.