I think the most insidious aspect of video games is that they are a success surrogate. I spent over a decade and a half playing games after dropping out of high school at age 16. What kept me going was the feeling of success and accomplishment I got from impressing my online friends in games.
Now in my mid-30s, I'm an undergrad in mathematics and finally putting my life back together. I've come to realize that video games are a terrible substitute for real life accomplishments and that online gaming friendships pale in comparison to building relationships with real people, in person.
While I would probably still enjoy playing video games, I have actively went out of my way to avoid them. I have replaced them with healthier solitary activities IMO(music production, UI design) or more outgoing activities like cultural meetups, hiking and the like.
Not sure what the difference is, but it's definitely different. Whenever I get into a game, I try and limit playing time to 2 hours at a time. Which, can be quite hard to accomplish. Even as a 38 year old.
Though my profession is probably owed to the unsanctioned time I spent online in my youth (especially time away from school), and I luckily never had access to enough unearned money to buy a fast enough computer to play video games, never really played video games much, and still don't now that I have threadrippers, hundreds of gigs of ram, and top tier GPUs sitting around everywhere.
Some parents see the issues with video games as extending to access to computers as a whole, and I think that could have its own social cost.
If I were raising a kid right now, I'd probably have them on a feature phone, and a PC which stops short of playing modern games; but I think a lot of people would struggle with hypocrisy if they did that, since they own gaming hardware and play video games themselves, and my own mother is rather attached to her smartphone.
Everyone thinks that, and then caves under the pressure.
I mean, I don't have kids, but I can't imagine being plied into spending hundreds of dollars on something which I don't want even for myself, and which I think is bad for the recipient.
It's easy to say you'll do this and that with kids, but things change when you have them.
This isn't true though, is it?
GTA V is simply cheaper for the sandbox space: but you're actually perfectly free to get some paintball guns, some cars, some gasoline, buy an old 7-11, fence it off, and play paintball GTA V.
That would just be more expensive and tiring, while less convenient.
(It sounds more fun to me, but YMMV -- and economically, you can probably rent the space to the police for training to break even.)
As mentioned above, there's just no comparison any more. I grew up in the city and had very, very few restrictions[1] on where/when I was out from around age 15, and we still preferred online. Going out in person is expensive, not everyone had equal transit access (and no one had a consistently available car), etc.
Yes, there were people who didn't join up online, who I would've loved to see more of. Meeting up with them more often would have been great, but doing it regularly just wasn't feasible - we'd see everyone at school and maybe after for 15-30 minutes while people cleared out, but that was the only regular thing.
[1] Mostly of the 'tell us where and when' variety - if my parents knew roughly how to find me if needed, that was good enough.
So if online interactions is the average, it will be hard to change that.
But, I generally agree with your statement.
Oh, I have a son, some it might be vastly different for daughters.