I strongly suspect that a large part of its recent popularity is because in the recent CDO-driven crash it suited the interests of the (influential) people whose decisions were actually responsible to spread the idea that the problem was that those silly geeky quants didn't understand that everything isn't uncorrelated Gaussians, ha ha ha.

Someone was overly impressed by the Central Limit Theorem... X-)

I can't say I ran into it before (whereas "economists think humans are all rational self-interested agents", jeez...)

Given that I remember spending a year of AP statistics only doing calculations with things we assumed to be normally distributed, it's not an unreasonable objection to at least some forms of teaching statistics.

Hopefully people with statistics degrees move beyond that stage, though.