So, this is to be taken with a grain of salt: A nurse once told me about this. I guess in the 90's(?) or so, there were a lot of children that were cognitively

So, this is to be taken with a grain of salt: A nurse once told me about this. I guess in the 90's(?) or so, there were a lot of children that were cognitively deficient to the extent that they required specialized care and such, but didn't necessarily fall into a category that would allot the parents funding. Lo and behold, autism becomes one of those categories, and the medical industrial complex has no qualms helping families to find funding. Autism is a perfect dragnet, lots of features to latch on to. Something like that. So maybe a lot of the autism diagnoses fall into the category of "we can't define this, but this family is fucked without the funds, so that's autism." But I never validated his claims, just food for thought. Good luck in the rabbit hole.