I am in the same situation. French citizen living in the UK. I never owned a credit card and I have no use for it.

I can't pass the age-verification. I am 49. This alone is quite irritating, but the overall developer-hostility of Apple and the quality drift of their software is convincing me to never buy an iOS device again.

And I'll probably not release any software on their platforms either.

French-US citizen living in the UK as well. I am not experiencing this because I refuse to install iOS 26 on my iPhone, and like the OP I am transitioning away from Apple to Linux + GrapheneOS, and about 90% of the way there since I started 6 months ago.