This is perhaps a controversial statement from someone who is fed up with all this age verification stuff, but having the user age be set on account creation (without providing ID or anything dumb like that) doesn’t seem that bad. It just feels like a way to standardise parental controls. Instead of having to roll their own age verification stuff, software like Discord can rely on the UserAccountStorage value. If it were possible to plug into a browser in a standard, privacy conscious way, it also reduces the need for third party parental control browser extensions, which I imagine can be a bit sketchy. OSes collect and expose language and locale information anyway. What harm is age bands in addition to that?

In theory yes. What’s bad though is that it’s meaningless. Sure the OS can say you are 10 years old or 100 years old and you can’t change it… but then you open a page in your browser which runs a virtual machine and that VM now says you are, arbitrarily 50 years old. The VM is just another piece of software but put it in fullscreen (if you want) and voila, you are back to declaring whatever age you want to any application or Web page within that VM. If that’s feasible (and I fail to see how it wouldn’t, see countless examples in archive.org/details/software or docs.linuxserver.io/images/docker-webtop/ even though that’s running on another machine, so imagine that was a SaaS) then only people who aren’t aware of this might provide a meaningful information on the actual age but that’s temporary, the same way more and more people now learn to use a VPN.