Ooh, I actually know something about this!
That particular industry basically did it to themselves--it all started out with pretty basic, low-powered, and temperamental cigarette-like devices developed in China by Hon Lik in the early 2000s, and the two flavor choices you had back then were basically "stale cookie" or "toothpaste"...sorry, I mean "tobacco" and "menthol". The intentions were good; Hon Lik was after a way to quit smoking, and it wasn't really viewed as anything else.
Once it caught on in other countries as a means to quit smoking, a LOT of sketchy people jumped into the industry to make a quick buck alongside a number of honest purveyors who just wanted to see people kick their cigarette habit, and things went Wild West pretty fast.
There was also an active scene of people building their own devices by modifying flashlights (a basic vape was pretty much the same thing as a common flashlight in principle, except the "bulb filament" is wrapped around a wicking material soaked in e-liquid), and China caught onto that craze and started putting out mass produced, higher-power devices with onboard electronics to handle power adjustment. On top of which, there wasn't a whole lot of education, not much focus on user safety, and then shit like people's vapes exploding and starting fires became a thing.
Juul came along in the mid-2010s and introduced a small, more reliable, and sleek pod device that used what are called "nicotine salts" (protonated nicotine using either benzoic acid or salicylic acid to make higher nicotine strengths easier to inhale, much more closely mimicking the way a cigarette feels).
Their big mistake was deliberately marketing to a very young audience, and suddenly, there was an epidemic of teenagers and middle school children getting their hands on Juul devices, which really wound up a lot of parents and brought vaping to the attention of anti-tobacco and "think of the children" lobbying organizations. The first PMTA deadline was actually around August 2016, but the FDA kept kicking the can down the road.
Fast forward to a few years later...remember those sketchy people I mentioned earlier? Well, some of 'em figured out you could vape cannabinoids, and then a few of them decided to squeeze more profit out of their margins by cutting their product with vitamin E acetate, and still more of them had basically zero quality control and/or just didn't give a toss one way or the other. Throw in the wide prevalence of sketchy bootleg products that people in many places could only get from sketchy sources, and you have a recipe for a budding public health disaster.
Unfortunately, people started getting dramatically ill from using these sketchy products, and doctors dubbed that illness EVALI (E-cigarette or Vaping Use-Associated Lung Injury), and a whole bunch of people absolutely lost their shit. A number of groups used this as an opportunity to lump in nicotine vaping as well, and...so much FUD was spread around. This pushed a federal judge into tearing off his wig, demanding that the FDA pull its finger out, and splintering his gavel. That's when the FDA finally started the ball rolling on actually following through with regulating the vape industry via PMTAs.
You know all the stereotypes and attitudes (some demonstrated in this thread) against vaping? That's part of what I mean by the industry collectively doing this to itself. They lost the plot, steered the bus away from the well-intentioned road of helping people quit smoking, and careened it straight off the cliff of greed and shortsightedness, and that gray chicken has well and truly come home to roost.
This isn't a popular opinion in vaping circles, but the vaping industry is in dire need of regulation and a better focus on user safety, so even though the methods used to push things along were treacherous and unsavory and certainly favored Big Cigarette, the end result is going to be something more grown-up and responsible than the crazy Wild West stuff that was going on over the past decade.
