It's not semantic bullshit. It depends on what value you substitute for "child" when you think about it. It's different when you're thinking 5yo vs. 15yo.

If anything, being outraged at calling parental controls censorship is what's bullshit. "Censorship is bad and protecting children is good, therefore parental controls are not censorship". We could instead call spade a spade, and then talk about when its use is justified.

The point is that legally parents are allowed to make that choice among other things. It doesn't matter if the kids are the direct user. This is the legal framework we live in

Disagree. We’re allowed to dislike the legal framework we live in. We’re allowed to say, if we wish to, that our laws appear to force[1] parents to use censorship to limit what their kids see, and that that is a bad thing. Furthermore we can say we disagree with the rules defining that censorship — for example, I have always been more disturbed by violent content than sexual, and I wish that fictional depictions of murder were even more unusual than fictional depictions of rape currently are in daytime television, i.e. never.

Of course I already know the standard counter-arguments, but those don’t change the visceral annoyance I have with a system that considers all full-frontal nudity to be a bigger problem than watching someone being shot, stabbed, or poisoned. I am also annoyed that the rules of these parental filters seem to copy American sociopolitical norms by default.

[1] reality depends on your jurisdiction, and I am not a lawyer in any case, but people still get to say that if they mistakenly think it’s true :-)

Blaming the law and society should be a separate thread. Conflating that with tech companies abiding to them is plain wrong and dilutes two separate issues.

Then GNU shouldn't try to use providing censorship tools as a pejorative.

If we agree that there are ethical ways to use censorship, providing censorship tools cannot be inherently unethical and companies shouldn't be faulted for doing so.