There's a lot of things that lawmakers put into law to protect people from their own dumbass decisions. Places where wearing seatbelts are mandatory have less car related deaths, same with helmets on motorbikes. Both things people should have the common sense to do without laws, but they don't. Furthermore, places where pool fencing is mandatory have less child deaths due to drowning, but that doesn't stop some people from not having a pool fence where it's not mandatory. There's hundreds of "common sense" things like these, that if they weren't actual law would be completely ignored.

So actual protections for children's use of the internet being made into law isn't necessarily a bad thing in and of itself. And if be all for them if they were reasonable and realistic, but they never are. No matter how much you want to make it so, expecting everyone to do reasonable things to protect themselves and those dependent on them without some sort of incentive is unrealistic.

Of course in saying all that, banning VPNs and all the laws people want to implement similar to it, have nothing to do with protecting children and everything to do with controlling people.