It jives with my perspective too, but I can't help also feeling like that's an "old man yells at cloud" viewpoint. The way kids use social media today is fundamentally different to my experience. Like the way my parents viewed IRC usage as an outlet for kidnapping or whatever. Kids grew up immersed in social media, and probably use it for rich and important social interactions that are alien to me. I view social media as a largely performative, toxic space and I've quit most of it. But newer generations might see a lot of value that I don't. (And that's not helped by constantly seeing articles about cyberbullying, depressive correlation articles like OP, etc.)

This is really off topic, but I just wanted to highlight how important the simpsons are to communication. Like, "old man yells at cloud" causes me to almost immediately understand your point (at least I feel I understand your point). The rest of your comment is almost unnecessary (although it is appreciated because it helps confirm that I am getting you).

Personally, the experience is a bit incredible.

Before the Simpsons this was just "get off my lawn", possibly inspired by some other piece of media long forgotten

Apparently made popular by David Letterman in the eighties so not much older than the Simpsons. It makes sense for it to not be very old, as most people didn’t own lawns until mid twentieth century or so.

The lawn as a concept has a fascinating history on its own. It’s a remnant of aristocratic signaling “look how much land I have that I can afford to put aside some of it over here for no reason”.

The 'old man yells at cloud' view point is an exaggeration of a valid mode of thinking. New and different !== bad inherently, but new and different !== good either. Outsiders have a valid perspective on things too.