Young kids are usually also too young to get a phone or buy games themselves, so it's mostly the parents who let them play on their devices. By this I mean parents who hand their 3 year old a phone with YouTube at the dinner table.

It's also parents who get them their first phone and choose what kind of a phone to get them (it's not all that unusual to see kids with dumbphones anymore).

Of course there should be a way to limit things like transactions and screen time but it doesn't have to be this whole surveillance tech with GPS tracking, granular permissions, and revealing what the kid texted his friends on a given day.

>My generation grew up to be generally fine people,

Correct, because the devices are powerful and cheap.

The devices that tend to be made for kids directly are normally extremely underpowered and expensive for their capabilities and anything you want to add to it is expensive. Most people have an extra phone that still works