Alright, so I did some reading of the research.

The attention part is “The task is to cross out all target characters (a letter “d” with a total of two dashes placed above and/or below), which are interspersed with nontarget characters (a “d” with more or less than two dashes, and “p” characters with any number of dashes).”

The participants are usually given 20 seconds per line and a total of 10 minutes. A controlled environment where the only thing you can do is this task seems like it measures some kind of attention but it might be not be generalizable.

I think the problem is that attention means a lot of different things. Often when people complain about lack of attention it’s within the context of the many distractions we have in the modern world.

So the scientific claim is “adult participants have gotten moderately better at the d2 attention task” but the article says “people are paying more attention”. To me that seems like clickbait from what is otherwise a reasonable meta analysis.