If you're willing to use alternatives and do without the services entirely then simply DNS blocking a handful of big names on your LAN immediately resolves the majority of the issue.
but i do remember my parents actually raising me pretty hands-on, taking care of me not watching stuff I shouldn't be watching which of course existed and was easily available
Cell phones and tablets don't spontaneously appear whenever a child wants one. Parents have the ability to hand devices over to children when they have time to watch them while they use it and remove those devices from them when they don't.
they really weren't
Sure, if we assume the kids are kept in a locked box at all times, I suppose.
What about when they go to school and use internet devices there? Some of them are even issuing personal laptops. Or they hang out with their friends or go to the library or visit a pc cafe (a bit rare in america, but still...)
Even beyond that, exactly how often are you monitoring what they do at home? Are you watching over their shoulder every hour they have access to an internet device?
Like, kids have been smoking/drinking/having sex/etc while their parents are ignorant for 100s of years, what makes you think parents are suddenly going to be able to supervise all internet access?
When I was a child we didn't even have wifi of any kind and I still did things like sneak down to the family desktop after my parents went to sleep and "surf the web".
None of this is to say that we should created nanny-net that controls the entire internet in the hopes of protecting children, but there's a lot of room between that and doing literally nothing.
I'm reminded of fairly recent efforts to strongly discourage people smoking in movies/tv and banning actual advertising and how effective that was at decreasing the population of smokers, at least until vaping came along.
The point is sometimes we can identify seemingly small areas that will make a large impact and take action there.
It's an actual choice:
https://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/11/fashion/steve-jobs-apple-...
I am strongly against this age verification, I think this is an absolutely, catastrophically terrible idea. However, I'm also a parent who has been in the trenches. This is a damn hard problem, and we will lose our access to computing and a relatively free internet if we just sit back and say that it's on parents and parents are stupid if they don't know how to solve this problem.
No software is going to stop kids with constant access to electronics, kids are resourceful.
It's a choice, there's no getting around that.
Seriously. There are mountains of evidence all of this is harmful to developing brains.
There huge benefits to being able to look things up, download books, talk to friends and family even if they live on another continent, playing chess or D & D online.
I think social media is net harmful (to adults too) but devices, games etc. are not bad per se.
Society works a lot better when we make the few bad actors that are out to exploit children stop, and instead expect everyone to look out for them/generally behave in prosocial ways. Things stop working when we say "why wouldn't you assume everyone around you is out to harm your kids and act accordingly?"
We can just say "actually you're not allowed to put gambling in a game targeting 7 year olds".
Spoken as someone who probably hasn't used iOS/Mac parental controls. It is a hot buggy mess that randomly blocks whitelisted applications as well. We use it, but it is a constant pain. Also a lot of applications only work half, e.g., TV apps blocking off all content rather than only content that is not age-appropriate.
By the way, we were initially firm believers of not using parental controls at all, by limiting time and teaching kids about how to use devices in a healthy way. But a lot of apps (e.g. Roblox, YouTube Shorts) are made to be as addictive as crack, making it very hard for a still not fully developed brain to deal with it.
That said, I absolutely dislike the current lobby for age verification because the goal of Meta et al. seems to be to be to absolve themselves of any responsibility by moving verification to devices and to put up regulatory walls to make it more difficult for potential competitors to enter the market. It is regulatory capture.