Once on a train, two women come up to me as they’re getting in, and start talking (so I take out the earbuds). Turns out they just needed directions and were here for vacation, with no phone service. I saw that they needed to take my stop, so I offered to help and had a nice conversation for 15 minutes with their broken English. They were super friendly and excited to be traveling through my city, and it really made my day to be able to help them and learn about their travel!
I wish I had moments like that all the time with strangers.
But yeah, I interpret headphones as "leave me alone".
Although from the article in the Netherlands, I suspect another reason why people use kiosks, is that folks working service jobs might not speak the language fluently, or the person was a tourist. I'm not criticizing anyone, I think it's a nice feature of kiosks.