Funny though how whenever these laws are pushed though, the legislators are more interested in strongly identifying people to gate services despite the fact that they should have plenty of advice that things like zero-knowledge proofs exist.

I hate to be cynical but I worry that this isn't going to matter, because it really seems that a lot of the pressure behind age verification isn't actually very interested in the age verification part...

It seems to me that the technical people who get invited to public debates are simply not competent or knowledgable enough. We definitely need to step up!

But a part of me wonders if this may be by design from the debate moderators - if a technical expert opens up by saying "we have a cryptographically secured solution that is backed by experts and privacy advocates alike", what's the next 45 minutes of the TV show going to be about?

Agreed. Now is our chance to very publicly inform our legislators. Not all is lost, yet.