They said the same thing about my generation
I'm 52 years old, and I recall that they said the same thing about my generation's television watching. And when my kids were young, Nielsen told us that school-aged children were watching something on the order of (IIRC) 10 hours of television per day, despite the fact that my kids barely had 7 hours from the time they got home from school to the time they were in bed. And that's the same generation of kids that supposedly had too many extracurricular activities (baseball/soccer/gymnastics/private tutoring/etc.) and not enough unstructured time, according to other researchers.
Not that there isn't some truth both then and now, or that it hasn't been multiplied by 5 since I was a kid, but research intended to prove a point usually does so.
It is certainly annoying when people, young adults especially, are pecking at their smart phones when you're trying to have a real conversations with them, but from what I've seen, the obsession isn't permanent and they re-enter the physical world soon enough.
