On one hand I completely agree that people are overreacting to adding a field that anything actually implementing age verification could potentially make use of.

But on the other hand I think people are not overreacting enough (in ways other than pointlessly harassing the names on a pull request) because this is a 'foot in the door' and basically the only way to prevent these vaguely worded laws from fully rooting everywhere would be massive blowback that actually has consequences for the corporations and governments pushing the laws.

But on the third hand, every Linux distribution collectively refusing to abide by the law and blocking California, Brazil, ect. IPs probably wouldn't have much overall impact so time would probably be better spent trying to get the average random person to care... and the average random person definitely does not care about systemd fields...

Yep, the people losing their shit about this should be fucking ashamed.

Do you mean the mere mention of age verification prompted them to react immediately in support of it, even if it is just a silly input field?