That's not correct. What the Jesuits were speaking about was not BoD per se, but the requirements for supernatural faith. It's rather independent of the BoD questioin. Jesuits introduced the novel idea that anyone who believes in a God who rewards the good and punishes the wicked can have supernatural faith. St. Robert Bellarmine does not believe that, nor does St. Thomas, nor does St. Alphonsus ... despite the fact that the three believed in BoD. These are seprate questions. If explicit faith is required, then BoD is not even in play for the infidels, but the Jesuits introduce the notion that it might be.
By introducing Rewarder God theory, a novelty, the Jesuits opened the door to infidels being saved. And this is what led to the new anti-Tridentine ecclesiology of Vatican II. No harm is done to the visibility of the Church to assert, as St. Robert did, that Catechumens were attached (at least partially) to the visible Church, and that sufficed to give them a possibility of salvation.
.
Yes, that is a different argument. Even still, who is to say that the problem really begins here? Because even those who held to it were otherwise orthodox (I hesitate to say Rewarder God is *obviously* untrue or heterodox, otherwise it would have been addressed at Trent, since at least one of the major theologians there held to it) and it didn't really prove that destabilizing an idea, again, until liberalism and modernism became en vogue. Why not just blame it on Origen, who introduced the idea of universal salvation (actually, not just a flirtation with it like Von Balthasaar)? Or on Adam for that matter?
All I'm saying is a diagnostic lacking in temporal proximity has minimal explanatory power. If we're simply surveying the history of ideas, it's hard to disagree that before we can get to the Vatican ii style of universalism, we need a 'bridge' of sorts, I.e., an apparently respectable idea related to it (in this case, Rewarder God theory). But that's so trivially true (since heresy always tries to 'root' itself in a prior idea, whether successfully or unsuccessfully) it doesn't make much better an explanation than blaming it on Adam does.