I wonder how much this is a factor of the widespread mental health malaise that is often attributed to tech these days? Certainly plenty of factors to go around, but consider the connotation of "scrolling" and how common it is a default replacement to boredom in modern life and suddenly it seems quite insidious.

Yes - I was actually deliberate about leaving infinite scroll out; I started w/ scrolling on tag pages, for example, but switched them to paginated - largely for the feeling you described.