[molmalo]

You are right in most of your comment. And yes, people always has been tired of having to learn how to use new stuff (I can imagine a caveman grudging about having to learn how to start a fire. LOL)

But the scale and complexity is important too. You can't compare a radio with two dials, and a smartphone with lots of screens. It's a whole new level of effort to learn how to use it. It takes more time, and it stack over previous knowledge you are supposed to have. But I know lots of elder people who don't even know how to turn on a computer. And sadly, they reject smart phones and other new things because they just gave up.

[dalke]

I'm presuming that you've not heard much about the earliest radios. They had two or three batteries in them ("A", "B", and at the beginning, "C" cells.) Don't mix up the batteries when you wire them in and make sure you have the right polarity as otherwise you might fry the tubes. Batteries could easily leak, so check them out for problems. If you're on a farm, you might want one powered from your car battery, which meant you could take it back to the car or a generator in order to recharge it. Then there's antenna setup. And tube replacement (since tubes go bad). Also, the early radios (excepting crystal sets) usually had three or more dials. For example, when you change the frequency you need to change the impedance of your antenna to match it. (Raise the lid or read the owner's manual to find the chart of how those correlate.)

Radios got simpler to use, in part because of the strong demand to make them simpler. They got simpler to use sometimes at the expense of more internal complexity (a starter motor for an automobile, instead of a crank) but sometimes because we just figured out an easier way to do things (Wozniak's Disk II controller is a classic hacker example) .

On the other hand, you are omitting all of the difficult, complex things we used to do, which we don't do now. Do you sew all your clothes, bedsheets, and curtains? I sure don't. Sewing isn't easy. That's a "whole old level of effort" I don't need to know. Do you regularly can or preserve your own foods? A few do, but it's easier and cheaper to buy things from the store. Until the last 1800s, many engineers and scientists learned draftsmanship (as different than art, mind you) because that was the best way to make a visual record of what you saw. Of course, the camera has nearly completely replaced that requirement, which we use to learn different things. Evolution, thermodynamics, Maxwell's equations, and more have simplified what was previously a bunch of unconnected concepts.

Our culture rides the wave of "just complex enough." If it's too complex, like early microcomputers, only a few people make the effort to learn it. It it's useful enough, then there's a lot of work put into making it simpler. When it gets simple enough, there's widespread use. So widespread use happens when something is just barely simple enough for most people to understand.

The idea you are talking about is at least 45 years old. Alvin Toffler wrote "Future Shock" in 1970 about this very topic. It popularized the phrase "information overload", which was coined in 1964. Note how someone who was 20 then would be an "elder" now.

Again I ask you, how do you judge that the rate of growth is more now than it was in the 1920s, or the 1970s? What meaningful metrics do you use, and how do you correct for you own biases of what is important? As far as I can tell, excepting the Great Depression, the amount of change and the turmoil over the amount of change has been constant for over a century.