Wasn't it that Queen's Gambit show that caused this recent surge in popularity?
Chess has been growing since last year, with the pandemic many IM/GM turned to Twitch, Hikaru started his growth last year for example. Obviously such a massive hit helped in getting random people interested and opened a window for some of the content creators (xQc and others) to jump into. Heck, even CarlSagan42 who plays Mario Maker 2 started playing it.
I used to play when child (typical father-son stuff), then at college I played a couple of tournaments and got my ELO measured at 1680, then dropped to 1630 by the third and then stopped playing. I got a chessboard and a clock at the office, we had one guy who was pretty good at it and we would play during the long deploy nights.
I recently started again with the Danish Gambit as white and trying to find a black opening different from the King's Indian which I used to play, almost reached
1200 at chess.com in a couple of days but then started having some trouble so I dropped to 1100 and have been playing unrated games mostly until I get confident again. I've beaten one 1600 player who I was paired with and can beat the bots up to 1500, unfortunately I'm quite rusty (somehow my mind can't elaborate moves to take advantage of pinned pieces).
Some prefer lichess.org, personally I got an annual membership at chess.com to see if I can return to my old shape