Yes, that is precisely what happened. In the 1890’s, the last few North America species were described (primarily grassland species in the northern Great Plains), and the rising generation of biologists basically got left with nothing. As such, there is a rather consistent trend of subspecies naming from 1900-1930. The American Ornithological Union was responsible for the reasonable curation of subspecies taxonomy, but when they acquired Central America and the Caribbean as part of the taxonomy in 1957, they decided to forego subspecies and focus on species-level decisions. And that in turn raised a generation of scientists that could care less about subspecies, and hence why we have a current taxonomy that’s 60+ years out-of-date.