My brother's property was a tangled mess after a tornado several years ago.Today,there should be a ton of browse in there but the huge deer herds in that area ate it all.Five years ago,you couldn't crawl through there.Today it's open enough to shoot through.You're sadly mistaken if you think that deer can't or won't effect the habitat in that part of the state.By the way,I can show you places where multiflora rose has to be bulldozed.
The tornado that hit Wyoming county didn't happen several years ago , it happened 20 years ago and what you are seeing is the normal progression of a clearcut to pole timber and we all know pole timber has little if any browse due to intense shading not due to deer. I have observed the the same normal progression of forest growth all across NE PA and it had nothing to do with too many deer.
You are a classic case of someone seeing what they want to see and what they told to expect, rather than the true cause and effect which created the conditions you observed.