There is nothing inherently wrong with wanting to marry someone you love or consuming marijuana whereas crossing the street while essentially being tunnel visioned on a 6" screen is potentially very dangerous for yourself and, more importantly, others.
How do you reconcile these two - almost identical precepts? The only difference is the phone and where "attention" is paid, yeah?
If your quick stop causes problems for any vehicles behind you, they were going too fast or weren't paying attention and they're at fault.
edit: jrockway said it better: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18932676
The reality is that if you're driving fast enough to not be able to stop for someone looking at their phone, you're also driving fast enough to not be able to stop for some kids chasing a ball into the street. You may not mind murdering some dude on Instagram but I bet you'll feel pretty bad about flattening someone's kid who was just playing outside after school. High-speed traffic and pedestrians don't mix. The problem is not distracted pedestrians, the problem is that the situation where the two classes of traffic can mix exist.
Ultimately, pretending that asphalt swaths cutting through the center of society is some "safe zone" for high-speed vehicles was a huge mistake society made. It was never true; someone could always penetrate that space and the unfortunate driver would end up killing them. Very slowly we are walking back on that, sharing space between cars, bicycles, and pedestrians. Lot less people getting killed. But it is unfortunate that China wants to repeat our mistakes there, and blame pedestrians for existing.
Today, there isn't, no. How about 50 years ago?
Edit: I feel like you entirely missed the point of societal progression, here. There's nothing wrong with it, now, but it doesn't - explicitly - mean that this was never the case or that your arguments of "protecting the people, themselves, or others" was never used to justify the illegality of them.