It’s definitely not new. But it’s spent most of its life as an open secret. Oauth has been around for ages, but nobody outside ‘nix world cared until a couple of years ago. Then MS started talking about it. Now it’s spreading like kudzu.
There are a lot of options out in the wild, and with cookies becoming true bete noirs, most platforms are switching to some type of proper tokenization to allow for persistence. Microsoft’s PRT (Primary Refresh Token) shows promise, but every tokenization scheme has its pros and cons.