Rise of the HR Recruiter Phone Screen?

I'm looking for a new job currently. What I'm noticing is that when a company wants to talk to me, now they almost always start with a "recruiter phone screen" (with someone in the company's internal HR recruiting team). However, if I think back to previous times in my career when I've interviewed -- maybe 5 years ago and further back -- this was not common at all. In the past, the first call was normally a technical screen conducted with an engineer or hiring manager.

Has anyone else noticed a trend nowadays where companies now start with a recruiter screen instead of a technical screen?