Yes, students are generally transactional. So give them a quiz on the reading and then start your discussion. It's been working for me for 25 years. My students were great at the beginning of my career and they're still great now.
Kids are absolutely illiterate, now, and it has nothing to do with “transactional” anything (witness the fact that the article says they’ve been transactional for this professor’s entire career and you didn’t notice).
You can argue it doesn’t matter and reading is dumb now that we have TikTok, but there’s no objective way to say that kids are currently reading and writing at grade standards at any level of school.
I don't think my students are unusual. Perhaps the situation in Canada is better than wherever you live.