What part of "it's not a bad thing" did you not understand?

"Don't comply in advance" is an instruction not to comply with bad things in an act of appeasement or to try to curry favour with the totalitarians. Complying with an actual well-intentioned policy is not "complying in advance" in the way that phrase is intended.

signal political support for California's privacy-eroding, pearl-clutching bullshit

I dunno what's going on in California. To be quite honest I don't care what's going on in California, or anywhere in America, in this regard. The UK and my own country of Australia have introduced age verification laws recently. And to be frank, they're shit. Australia's law was rushed through Parliament with zero scrutiny and zero regard for the ramifications of the law.

And this feature? It would not comply with that law. Because our law actually requires some method of verification done by the sites themselves.

My interpretation of what's going on here is Linux would be showing the Australian government "hey look, we don't give a fuck what the law you wrote says because it's shit. We're doing something that achieves the outcomes you claim to want in a way that doesn't have the downsides of your shitty law."

I've been advocating for exactly what this guy did right here since November 2024, when the Australian government first pushed through its shitty law without regard for how the law actually worked. Because it's a good use of technology to achieve a well-meaning outcome, in a way that is well-considered rather than doing the laziest privacy-invasive method. If California has come up with a law that can be complied with in that way, I guess well done to them. I'm not changing my opinion on good policy just because someone I don't trust for unrelated reasons also agrees with it.