the current state has been close to that, and is co-associated to be a related to many existing issues wrt. to children/mental health/child safety (I very intentionally use co-associated instead of correlated, and definitely not root cause)

you could say law makers of many countries have given the industry ~30 years time to self regulate and come up with something acceptable by themself

The industry didn't. Now they have to regulate, it's their job and responsibility to do so :(

(but it's also their responsibility to not listen to highly malicious/biased lobbyist trying to hijack it into surveillance laws!)

honestly to some degree the industry still has a short time frame to fix it themself, provide an acceptable solution which can mostly work internationally (by having localization in it) and pitch that to the EU and US states not having yet decided on age verification laws, so that the few which already have some bad laws are pressured to change course

Through the problem is many non-cooperate entities instead insist it's all nonsense and there is no problem and companies like G, MS, Meta etc. have little interest fixing the situation. A misguided, hard to implement age verification law creates a legal moat to hinder smaller competing companies...

we have seen the same with the EU AI act, it's general outline is very reasonable especially if base that assessment on the corner comments. But thanks to big tech lobbyist hijacking it it became a economical/regulatory moat catastrophe (in the details and the parts which have not yet taking effect, not in every aspect).