That totally makes sense from a software engineering point of view. The age check was probably implemented as a "verified_age" column somewhere, and they didn't bother backfilling it with your existing google account info.

It doesn't make sense for a trillion-dollar company known for some of the best software engineering. There are remarkable lapses in UX with Google products.

Google is the new IBM. There are certainly amazing things being done but 90% of the employees are just doing boring CRUD and have never done anything special.

Best engineering? Ever tried hiring some of those ex Google contractors?

There is plenty of good engineers in Google and plenty of terrible engineers.

So their vaunted gruesome job interview process is no more effective than any other company's boring old normal one.

Someday I hope to read an article or watch a talk explaining Googles approach to UX.

The best UX in a Google apps seems to be Gmail, and that’s honestly not that good either.

Google is able to build insanely complicated infrastructure, design cool languages, they produced fantastic backend software and the they completely forget that people need to interact with it.

The best UX is in products they killed, like Inbox or Play Music.

Gmail at some point had a good UX. Nowadays I've switched back to a local mail client because their webmail is weirdly sluggish for no reason.

Absolutely, but for one of the largest sites on the web, served by one of the richest companies on the planet, being the one company knowing the most about me (and billions more) compared to other companies, and Youtube being probably one of the most profitable sites on the web too, I do expect better.

That's very convenient for them, if so, but I very much doubt that's the reason.

Any Googlers reading this discussion? Was there a valid reason for these decisions or did everyone just miss it?