What is with this recent trend of people wetting their lips?

At least that's the only explanation I can think of for why in hell they feel a need to do it. I've never had to. I'm talking about this thing where the person sort of pushes their tongue out between their lips briefly. It triggers me just to bloody describe it. It used to be rare as hell in movies and I'd never seen anyone do it in RL, but in the last couple years I see people do it all the time, news shows and live-action movies show it literally every few minutes. Even animated movies like Coco and Incredibles 2 have it, so I know people are aware it's a thing and doing it on purpose. Venom had one particularly enraging example where a random civilian woman had a two-second face closeup, where she did nothing but that little motion with her mouth, as if the entire intent was to show the audience her doing that. Why? When I see people do this, it makes me need to rotate their jaw ninety degrees along the Y axis. Or not specifically, exactly that, but you get the idea. So I'm desperate to know: Why is this a thing people do, especially recently? Does anyone else feel this way?