Yes this is very much the reason. It gets dry where I am in the winter, and it never occurred to me to do this. An older gent in a coffee shop once watched me try to turn a page, and enlightened me. I’ve met more than a few people who have a dedicated finger glove for turning pages :)
Wet sponges [0] for people counting money were a very common sight some decades ago before money counting machines and mostly electronic payments. Probably still being used just not so obvious anymore. Regardless of age fingertips will eventually get too dry as the paper absorbs all the moisture and flipping pages or separating banknotes becomes hard.
For touchscreens dry fingers are also called "zombie finger" [1]. The screen registers the too minute change in electrical field as noise and rejects the touch event. Some sweat (but not too much) on the fingers makes all the difference.
I'm also in a dry climate, and even as a teenager I often had to lick my fingers in order to get the plastic bags at the grocery store open (I was a bagger so had to do it all day). Eventually we got smart and started putting wet sponges by the bags, which is also an amazing life hack if you have trouble turning pages.
I'm unclear if this was intended to be sarcastic, but it's certainly possible for e-readers to be more accessible than books, at least for models that actually have physical buttons (and especially considering that e-readers can have zoomable text).
As far as I can tell, none of the current Kindle models have physical page turn buttons anymore, which is insane to me.
Turning the page is the main thing I do on an ebook, having a button on the side is so much more convenient than touching the screen, I don't obscure what I'm looking at, and I don't smudge the screen.
The BOOX Palma is an e-ink Android device (not a phone) that I run the Kindle app on. It has physical page buttons, and is better than any of the Kindle devices I've used. Also tunable ink speed and color temperature.
Maybe not accessible in the a11y sense, but definitely accessible in the "can read without DRM" sense. I'll take a book I can keep and read whenever and however I want to one that has to phone home and ask a giant corporation if it's ok.
