It was some nebulous shoulder thing last year but yeah it's certainly possible the injury began a year ago and it was just hard to detect or not yet affecting the elbow specifically
kinetic chain gets all f***ed up and then in a matter of months, or sometimes years, the elbow eventually pops
in fact, given the sudden decline in stuff (he went from something like an SP3 in MLB to a bad AAA pitcher) I would bet that this is what happened. he was hurt heading into 2023, it was just a sneaky injury.