Not new. Turbotax has long lobbied the government to make the tax law convoluted so you have to use Turbotax (or another similarsoftware) so you can avoid fines for submitting the wrong amount of taxes.
You're correct that it doesn't have to do with patents. But the point is about abusing the legal system to extract value from others. What Turbotax does is worse. So it is not a "new level" of abuse of the legal system.