That's more likely from dopamine being fried from screens and instant gratification than a statement about the quality of books.
I got back into reading about a year ago, and it took me a month before I could read like I used to as a kid, fully immersed, let the world disappear kind of thing. I was looking up every minute before that with a strong urge to grab my phone.
Of course, reading a book is going to take some training. The nice part is that if one reads for 15 minutes to a half hour a day, it becomes fairly easy to focus on a book within a few days. As long as the book is engaging/interesting to its reader.
Turning the phone on silent and/or keeping it in another room while reading helps a lot as well.
I realized during a pre-Endgame re-watch that I liked a lot of the marvel movies better at home than I had in the theater, and after some reflection figured out that it’s because when I get really bored in the middle of one of their not-very-good 20-minute fight scenes, or awkward too-long exposition, I can just screw around on my phone.
On further reflection it occurred to me that this kinda replicates the experience of watching a mediocre movie with a close friend group and just talking over a bunch of it. Lots of movies are better when half-ignored!
Of course, there are plenty of movies where you’ll have trouble following them or miss cool, interesting, very-good, or important elements if you don’t give them your full attention. But I do think there may be a case for phone-in-hand film-watching. Some might argue that you should just skip any movie that gets better if you partially-ignore it, but I’m not on that boat.
It struck me as an excellent description of how it feels for me now to pick up a book, at least before I manage to stay with it long enough to settle into it and experience the multisensory panorama you speak of. Books are no less potent now, for me, but they are more impenetrable; there's a thicker shell of resistance to break through before I can have that experience; and Sam Kriss's words here describe it exactly.