I still think that while this may have had an impact on a few hundred, the biggest factor is bitcoin price in terms of new account creation. The late 2017 bullrun had a huge impact.....
That's is certainly a factor. You can look at the Google search stats to see there is always more interest during a bull run, the same thing happened in 2013. I don't think it possible to put a definitive split as to how much effect that had on sign-ups versus how much effect putting account farmers out of business had. There were people farming hundreds of accounts at the same time. It took a year and a half to build an account up to Hero when they could sell it for several hundred dollars. These people were signing up tens of accounts every week each.