Bingo! I have noticed the exact same thing and wondered the same thing... if EA has added some new boost/adaptive coding this year.
FYI, when I start a game and see all the players speeded up like that, I pause, lower speed and accel sliders 3-4 points for both USER and CPU, and that more or less returns the game back to my preferred speed.
I have also heavily edited the db to help with the boost issue, and can see that it is not as effective as those edits used to be. But they do still work enough that I'm generally happy with it.
..... I might have found something important and useful.
Messing around with the db in the last few days I found out that mental attributes (interceptions, positioning, vision, aggression, composure) seems to act as multipliers for the other attributes. In fact if you lower mental attributes and leave the other attributes untouched, teams will lose a 2 stars rating from overall even if you don't touch other attributes
So today I decided to make 2 databases: both with the five mental attributes set to 1 (one) for all the players in all the teams.
The first one leaving the players as deault
The second one just changing the mental attributes to 1 to my already lowered db.
I played something like 4 matches with each of the two db and for now I haven't noticed yet any particular boost or cheat. Well of course with default attributes (and only mental set to 1) game seems sometimes to speed up anyway, especially with top teams but still less than before and it remains balanced between you and the cpu
While with my personal db with lowered attributes and mental set to 1 I played some of the best matches ever: all the 4 matches were slow and balanced and maybe for the first time I noticed a difference between fast and not so fast players. For example I had a very hard time keeping up the pace of the faster players of my db in open field, but yet I could manage to defend well. Also you can run away from cpu with faster players, but in a realistic way, not like default game where cpu defenders remain stuck. This time they just try to reach you and then a second one come to close you down and stop you. Also I tried to run away with Rakitic to Casemiro (both not super fast but with different values) and After some meters Casemiro reached me even if I had a couple of meters of advantage.
I also noticed some different animations and more realistic behaviour and everything seemed more natural and not scripted
Now all of this might just be a coincidence because you can't say much from only 4 matches.
I'm going to try more.
I hope that you more expert guys like Fidel and Bangus try these things about mental attributes in your dbs
I can upload my testing db if you want to try it. If you want to try it send me a PM or if Fidel don't mind I can link it here