I wonder if every generation is doomed to feel this way. Socrates was horrified about the corrosive effect of reading upon young people's ability to memorise speeches. Plus ca change etc.
On the other hand, as the guy on twitter recently said, "it's not fair that I spent my childhood teaching my parents to use a printer and as an old man I'm spending my old manhood teaching my adult children to use a printer".
My older relative is complaining that their working life roughly coincided with the time where computers became mainstream but were still hard to use, and now that computers have become easy to use (think smartphones and tablets) their (the relative’s) productive days are more or less over and all their hard-earned difficult computer knowledge is becoming obsolete. So they were the generation that had it hardest, because they had to deal with computers (unlike earlier generations) but had to do so before computers became easy to use (unlike later generations).
To be fair, "reading" in Socrates' time was viewed as social media or Netflix is seen today. Mindless entertainment. There was more of an emphasis back then to focus on a few solid works, memorize and really chew on the content and not consume religiously.
To some extent I'm sure the answer is yes, so I think the operative question is not "Are kids learning what I learned?" Instead it has to be something more subtle.
Perhaps "Is kids' knowledge broadened and deepened by the media they consume?" more generally would do. It allows us to evaluate extent, change, and appropriateness more broadly. Not just the accessibility of a given topic, but how readily one can dive into the details and truly learn something.
The landscape of media then can change, but this question does not react to any and every change in the landscape the way a nostalgic argument does. Socrates would have no reason to worry; a book can broaden and deepen knowledge, too. Are we?
Agree to some context. Maybe every generation we have 'why is this thing so hard', so html/css was hard. I think in early 90's, one might say so hard with styling issue due to lack of standardization (page layouts and hacks needed to ensure working on all major browsers). Then there was Flash, jQuery. Now plethora of modern stack __how__ we do this and with magnitude more features.
If you don't need the features, React isn't an abstraction over HTML, it's a complication. Plus CPUs aren't getting exponentially faster anymore - that is a real game changer.
https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext....