Which, incidentally, wasn't a crime until March 2018, when Congress passed a law that not only made it a crime, but retroactively criminalized it for Backpage.
This is absurdly unconstitutional, of course[0], and the bill's author (Blumenthal, a Democrat from Connecticut) should know that, since he was the Attorney General for Connecticut before.
Of course, Blumenthal does know this, because he's been waging a personal war against prostitution for the past decade. He's the reason that Craigslist shut down the "erotic services" section about ten years ago, which meant that sex workers had to start posting in the personals section. (Of course, this gave them cause to write FOSTA/SESTA, at which point Craigslist had to shut down the entire personals section as well.)
[0] https://medium.com/@TechFreedom/yes-sesta-is-probably-uncons...
Starting with page 42, they list these ads. They somewhat hilariously call the subject of every ad "victim 1", "victim 2", despite there being no evidence, or indeed reason to believe, that they are or were.
I am reading this as someone who's thinking like the author of the reason article: A website running prostitution ads should legally be allowed to exist. You claim to be open to that position. Read like this, ignoring everything that presumes such a thing is in itself wrong, there are maybe 15 or 20 points out of the 156 that could even be considered relevant.