I've seen quite a lot recently saying a particularly distracting aspect of phones isn't that they're a screen and a visual stimulus, but a tool and a haptic stimulus.

An increasingly popular way to combat checking your phone while watching TV is to busy your hands with something. If this works and is widely adopted, we won't need shows to have second-screen writing repetition; our brains tell our hands to use the tool, and it just so happens that the tool is full of text and speech and occupies the language center of our brains, meaning we stop listening to the show.

Also, a whole separate thing I often think about, before 2010, there were very few high budget TV shows. TV was made on a much smaller budget than film, and the writing often took a hit too, and that was just the reality of watching TV. They were also designed to hook people who were clicking around channels with lots of recaps and narrative refreshers, for people tuning in halfway through, this is like the second-screen writing issues we complain about now on steroids, straight to TV movies were also terrible for this.

Movies that were designed for Cinema revenue weren't impacted by this or course, but even DVD revenue movies often have simpler plots and reiterate their narratives for people who are half watching while chatting or stoned or whatever.