> This is where regulation is supposed to come in.

Yes, agreed. However regulation does not necessarily have to mean age checks.

The most obvious low hanging fruit to start off with is open and interoperable content filtering infrastructure (ie parental controls) so that there's some common standard that literally everything supports out of the box. It needs to all work together - the current situation tends to be spotty and unreliable thus parents tend not to bother trying to use it.

Start with an extensible metadata format that enables websites to self-classify pages. Account for things like loading alternative resources on the same page. Mandate that all websites and app stores include such metadata and that all browsers and operating systems have some baseline functionality for making use of such data in a sensible manner.

Only after that has completely and utterly failed should we even begin to consider highly invasive measures such as mandating government ID checks.