I love the feeling of protection I get from willingly giving all of my personal data to a corporation who is super cosy with the most corrupt and oppressive US government there has ever been.

Yeah protecting their customers is definitely Apple's prime motivation... Wouldn't be about hoovering up even more of their data than the rat finks already do. There is no world in which any of this is pro consumer, it's governments and corporations teaming up to gang rape consumers under the thin veneer of public safety and there are enough apologists out there trying to find some way of reinterpreting this as anything other than what it is. It doesn't make children safe; it gets them accustomed to mass surveillance and data insecurity, it doesn't force porn to become better; it just forces it and its consumers underground, it doesn't stop criminal activities; it just forces them to become more sophisticated. Actual authoritarian governments have struggled to make this shit work, what makes you think governments as bumbling and inept as the US, UK or Australia are going to be able to succeed where they failed?

On the flip side if the goal is to set up direct feeds for the bulk of the population to have their real identity and banking details associated with every online interaction so it's all accessible to the various organisations that want to spy on people, well they are smashing that out of the park.

Anecdotally here in Australia less than 10% of my kids year 8 class lost their social media access, the majority lost it for less than a day... Something like 40-50% of their parents loaded their ID onto various verification sites, which part of our age verification laws do you think were important based on that?