I just went through airport security and was quite surprised how easy it was (relatively speaking). Didn’t have to go through a body scanner, didn’t have to separate liquids, didn’t have to take out my laptop, and my boarding pass wasn’t even scanned. Did some rules change? Is their thoroughness related to terrorist threat levels?
Some airports have fancy scanners that don’t require removing anything. For everything else, maybe you were marked for precheck or similar? Its only a trend when your return trip is the same.