As a parent of kids with iThings, the parental controls/screen time experience is incredibly bad. I have no idea why they are not interested in having it work.

100% agree. We had to turn it off because it was too frustrating for everyone involve. Now we’re at “trust, but verify” where “verify” is looking at Screen Time stats at the end of each week.

My only plausible explanation is that no one who works at Apple has kids.

The more time kids spend on the device, the more revenue Apple generates. They don’t have any incentive for it to really work.