I think the pandemic might have forced a big hit. For me, the social skills I had built up in the ~4 years leading up to lockdown were basically entirely wiped away by isolation.

I've been thinking a lot about ways communication was essential for day-to-day life, and how preferences wiped that away entirely. I became an adult when self-checkout was in every grocery store I'd been to. And those shitty kiosks that fast-food joints like Dunkin Donuts have are really nice, because they take away the time pressure of trying to make decisions by squinting at a distant menu that's constantly sliding and fading. But it also means another place where we can avoid actual human interaction.

Not to get Spiritual, but every consciousness is kind of an amazing thing? We're all wet, small, imperfect models of the universe around us, and when people come together, we make a bigger, wetter, more perfect model of the universe around us. When people say "math is beautiful" and "science is beautiful", it shares that same beauty that exists when people come together.

I grew up with people bemoaning downward trends which didn't actually exist. ("People are getting dumber!" no they weren't. "Crime is going up!" the numbers say otherwise.) But now the downward trends are real and the idea of people getting even worse at communicating is scary. But I think you're right and it's a downward trend that is also happening.