Instead of teaching kids phonics ("what sounds do those letters make?"), they are being taught alternative forms which boil down to whole-word recognition and guessing. Don't recognize a word? Just make up something which feels right in this context. The result is that kids have incredibly poor reading skills, so they don't read books because they simply can't read.
It's made even worse by the "students are less likely to identify works of literature as favorite books, instead referencing young adult books like the Percy Jackson series" elitism going around. If you want kids to read, stop force-feeding them boring and outdated "classics". Those books aren't fun, they don't align with their day-to-day life, and kids just don't care about them. Would you rather have a kid who ends up with the idea that reading is horrible because they were forced to go through Ulysses and who is never going to read a book again, or do you want a kid who thinks reading is fun because they read a dozen Percy Jackson novels and who is going to branch out beyond YA later in life?
It's easy to blame social media and TikTok, but we've heard those same lazy arguments blaming "modern innovation" for decades. First with radio, then with television, then with internet, then with games, and now finally with social media. It's wasn't true then, and it's not true now.
And stop trying to drag "the left" and student lone forgiveness into this: it has absolutely nothing to do with kids' reading skills and only undermines whatever argument you're trying to make.