People have been working on making things addictive / attention getting forever. Sugar? Caffeine? Video games? Back in the day plenty of drugs, including those sold by pharmacists.
Either you have agency or you don't. I for one very much like the idea of someone with some actual expertise in how addictive products are created talking about how to avoid the addiction.
If you don't want to read his stuff - don't. And if you wanted to avoid these issues, even before this book lots of others. One easy one - no TV at home. I don't watch any TV shoes. I don't play any video games. Not sure if that's in the book, but getting outside, getting exercise, sleeping, spending time with partner, no phones at the dinner table (or breakfast or lunch) etc go a long way to just being a bit more distraction free.
Agency means you can decide what you want to do with your day and your life.
To much of anti-addiction / behavior self improvement stuff comes across as just pablum.
And once you as a teen you have built up these distraction mechanisms in your life, it becomes harder to let go as an adult.
This is a society level problem, to some significant extent.
Or maybe it's on a scale, where you can do various things to protect yourself, but those require time and energy which are not unlimited.
Things such as no TV -- I would also say no social networks on a phone, ever! -- are obviously good. It is easy to reduce a distraction of something if you can eliminate it from your life completely, without any significant cost. It's like, when you want to get rid of alcoholism, it is easier to avoid pubs completely, rather than trying to regulate how much you consume.
Problem is when you cannot avoid some situations completely. Turning off the internet, forever, would have a negative impact on many people's jobs. And there is a lot of distraction even on Stack Exchange -- if I am looking at an answer of a technical question, why is it also necessary to be notified about hot questions about movies, video games, politics, etc.? (On my home computer, I could install a blocker, but that already requires some skills that many people don't have. On my employer's computer, I am not even allowed to install browser plugins, for security reasons.)
It is an arms race. As people learn to turn off some forms of distraction, experts keep inventing more intrusive ones.
I'm guessing you get this a lot.