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"screen time" is too vagueIn a world where most adults of the current generation spend almost more time in front of the screen than away from it, one would indeed think that "screen time" means nothing in and of itself.
I think we also completely fail in every way to measure the benefit — because adaption, evolution tells us one thing: while there are "better" and "worse" paths, it's only ever retrospectively; the corrolary is that it's almost impossible to actually predict evolution, to "design" it — it's sci-fi, for now. So I've always been wary of applied fields faced with a paradigm change, in history: they always tend to lag a lot, even more so than people outside the field — perhaps because they're so deep in it that they can't see what's obvious to a bystander, idk.
Note that it's healthy, in science — skepticism is what makes us great, in a way, because we don't condone "intuition" as "theory" unlike any other endeavor of the human mind. But science is not up to predict individual let alone social evolution, a far, far cry from it that's even on the side of "maybe's" in some abstract idealistic future.
Right now, we're left with trying to make the best out of what we've got to prepare kids for a future we can't see ourselves, and we probably take a cue or two for our own life in that process — I'll let you be the judge of whether parenting is a learning experience...
My intuition, deep down, is that a reasonable¹ dose of exposure to technological tools is very desirable in developing one's fluency with said tech; and may constitute one of these hard to measure but clearly obvious — you "know it when you see it" — difference between "nerds" or "geeks" and the "computer illiterate" (which, I observe, are less but still many in the millenials generation compared to X and boomers, contrary to my initial intuition).
Generally, I think one should trust each step of the way their "gut feeling" about the development of their children, and adjust accordingly, remain in a "safe zone", sane defaults when in doubt. It's also been shown to a convincing extent that "just trying hard, for real" and "showing up, being there" and being very human in simply trying to communicate with children, is as sure as we have of a recipe for success — because it's bound to be very relevant, very ad hoc to your own situation, and thus that of your children. Go against the grain if it makes them better if your eyes and in their experience of life, just don't ignore hard facts from other parents as well.
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¹ By "reasonable" I mean not impairing other development; but it's also "reasonable" to envision that some skills are less useful nowadays than 50 or 500 years ago (despite the brain's ability for them, and our ability to measure abstractly relevant "improvements" or "impairments" here or there). Conversely that some are more useful, but we may not yet test for these.