Palo Santo's first article notes that its wellness-market fame is recent. What that first article did not have room for is how fast the change happened, and what got lost in the compression from a specific Andean coastal practice into a generic "cleansing wood" sold worldwide.
Bursera graveolens grows along the dry Pacific coast of South America, chiefly Ecuador and Peru, and its use as a cleansing and blessing smoke there is a regional folk and shamanic practice, carried out by curanderos in healing work that often sits alongside, rather than instead of, Catholic devotion in the same household. It was never a single unbroken pan-continental tradition the way frankincense's incense-road trade was; it stayed local for most of its history.
Global demand arrived within roughly the last few decades, not as a long trade relationship but as a rapid wellness-market discovery, and it moved faster than the tree's traditional harvesting rule could scale: only fallen or already-dead wood is supposed to be cut, since a living tree's fragrance takes years to develop fully, and commercial suppliers meeting the new international market have not always observed that rule, putting pressure on wild stands of a slow-growing species.
The result is a compressed history almost unique among the resins and woods here: a practice that took centuries to become what it is in Ecuador and Peru became a global commodity in roughly one generation.