I'm aware of this debate and the history, and cheered the reintroduction of mandating phonics instruction to New York Public Schools, one of the last holdouts in the country.

So yes, I agree: research and common sense show that phonics-based instruction is a more effective way of teaching children how to read, compared to the long-discredited whole language movement.

But I take issues with two ideas in your post: first, that this is an issue that affects a lot of people, and second, that this affects younger generations more than older generations.

To the first point, I'm arguing that most people eventually learn how to read, regardless of what the formal district or state level curriculum says to use. Some combination of parents and caretakers and external learning materials (children's books, children's television, apps and toys, tutoring, external programs like the very popular hooked on phonics) are teaching them outside of school. Lots of teachers are giving individualized instruction and getting people past the hump, even if the district or state curriculum says to do things a particular way. Many kids enrolled in non-phonics curricula still get plenty of exposure to phonics instruction. New York being slowest to return to phonics contributed to this perception, in that New York's (and Columbia University's) outsized media/cultural influence led this conversation to be had decades after it was already settled in most of the rest of the English-speaking world.

For the second point, your post makes it sound like this is something that young people today are encountering for the first time. No, these ideas stem from a centuries-old debate with non-phonics instruction peaking basically during my own childhood in the 80's. The backlash against whole language was going strong in the 90's, and culminated in the federal Department of Education coming down hard on the side of phonics during the GWB presidency. Most of the state and local educational systems got on board by then, too. And maybe the boomers that got the most concentrated version of Whole Language grew up to be slightly less literate than other generations. But whatever it is, there are so many other things affecting them today, too, to where "how they were taught to read in 1960" isn't going to be a factor distinguishable from plain old noise.