Not to the same extent though - for example I can't remember if I ever had to take my shoes off (maybe there was a couple of months where we had to do it back after the attempt happened in December 2021?), so I was pretty shocked to go to the US for a work trip in 2019 and have to do that. Here in Australia there's no liquid limit in carry on for domestic flights.
Nowadays I don't need to remove shoes in the US. I vaguely remember times it was randomly required or not, not sure when, and back when it was always required. I'm not TSA precheck or anything. But yeah we have the liquid limit, which always seemed like the one dumbest thing to me, maybe even a way to sell drinks.
Unless it has changed for a while the TSApre lines don't make you take off shoes and belts vs the regular lines. I also think they stopped making TSApre tahe laptops and iPads out of bags. But it may also have to do with equipment upgrade cycles and what was deployed to which lines.
TSA precheck was originally for avoiding removing shoes, belts, and laptops. I had it at some point and gave up because random lines kept making me remove stuff anyway, but only telling me that after my bag was already taken aside for search, so it wasn't worth.
Newer xray machines don't require anyone to remove laptops. It's about 50/50 whether I get a new machine lately. Just today at SFO, had to remove laptop but not shoes.
