Hey, we must have been in high school at the same time. I saw the same thing going through my final years. But when I went back to visit the school a few years after I left... Things were very different.

I'd say there was definitely a grace period (roughly iPhone -> iPhone 4 maybe?) where device addiction wasn't yet normalised, and the real world hadn't ceded control yet. Not sure what happened at the school level after that, but somewhere along the way phones (devices as they were called then) everywhere all the time became very normal.