So the scientific claim is “adult participants have gotten moderately better at the d2 attention task” but the article says “people are paying more attention”. To me that seems like clickbait from what is otherwise a reasonable meta analysis.

Agreed, and unfortunately almost all science “reporting” has this problem.

Which is why we don’t listen to people who haven’t at least read the source material, and ideally have read and understood enough about the field and methods to be able to evaluate if they are reasonable for the task.