I have a personal bias but suspect this is more prevalent than it's made out to be since I've both lived through it and have not had much opportunity throughout my life to recognize how the two issues were connected until many years later.

I think always-on Internet devices both exposed latent difficulties in home/working life that already existed for many and amplified those same vulnerabilities. You can observe a single person on their phone for 8 hours a day and call it "problematic usage", but this alone does not give enough information about what underlying forces drive so much usage. If it's boredom, then why are they bored all the time? If it's stress, then where does so much stress originate from?

The introduction of smartphones has raised the stakes since a huge number of people are now confronted with the same problem in a highly talked-about way, some of which could have been activated by latent mental vulnerability that may not have been brought to light in a past age. And sometimes this does result in a discussion of sometimes completely unrelated personal issues, but by their nature I would imagine not many would be willing to open up about them in public, compared to complaints about social media. Problems related to tech get a lot of social advocacy, but I find it hard to imagine a national "organization for adults abused by <type of guardian>". What is there to advocate for when the issue at hand already opened and shut itself decades ago and the people involved are either dead or incapable of admitting fault? Not to mention that the causes for each trauma are wildly diverse, and sometimes there is not enough information to be able to find a concrete meaning in the events at all?

Sadly, even regulation of technology seems to be a workable issue compared to that of preventing future abuse. Each upbringing is distinct, and most effort seems to be put towards recovering from abuse long in the past knowing that (when dealing with certain personality types) there will never be hope for reconciliation. Knowing how intractable a problem intergenerational trauma is is enough to make me lean antinatalist at times, even though I say I am recovering.

I've talked about how intergenerational trauma has affected my family before, although I didn't mention it started in 1918 when my great great grandfather killed my great great grandmother in a murder suicide, leaving my great grandmother an orphan who would one day abuse my grandma. [1]

I think there are patterns to abuse regardless of the cause. Abuse is essentially addiction to control or anger (the seven deadly sins are all forms of addiction). The patterns I can see give me hope that it is entirely possible to stop the cycle.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40485608