We all know that laws are not a good indicator of morality, but society is better when we try to align laws over time with our moral code.
These age verification laws all mandate that no identifying information be kept. The Texas law has a $10,000 penalty per instance for record retention. It's still perhaps not the best way to do it, but people are being very disingenuous in their characterization of these laws. It's not that much different from requiring people to show ID at the door of an adult store.
*: are those verification schemes set up such that also the government doesn't get to see who accesses which sites?
There you go. You just eliminated pretty much all access for children to online commercial providers.
It's not perfect, but that's a silly reason not to do it. We don't let kids into adult bookstores just because they could (currently) easily get it online. We don't let them buy drugs and alcohol at stores just because they could find an older friend to get it for them. It is already illegal to provide porn to children. Businesses (mostly ad-based ones) have just been getting away with being completely negligent about it for the last 10-20 years.
The Utah law for example seems to specify that either the user provides a digital id, which seems to be a sort of signed message from the state that they've saved into a secure element (so not doing realtime checks with the government. It's not really specified how it works, but it says they can save an ID file to their phone), or use a commercial knowledge based auth solution. So yes, it seems that it's been specified such that the government does not get access to that information.
It seems like regulatory overreach into something which in the grand scheme of things is a very small problem. Today it's porn sites, what will it be tomorrow? Once in place, such laws will be very hard to repeal out of "think of the children" concern. In reality, such laws are never just about children.
Also, what even counts as a porn site to begin with? Is Reddit one, since it has lots of well-known porn subreddits? Do classic web forums for a similar purpose, or Whatsapp groups or Facebook count too? (Don't know how strict their content policy currently is)
Reddit is exactly the type of site that demonstrates the need for some regulation. They have major forums targeted at children (e.g. teenagers, roblox, minecraft) with millions of members, but half their site is porn, and there is no barrier between the two. You'd need to MITM and inspect which forum someone is on to figure out if it should be allowed.
You could say "just block the whole site", but if pornhub had a porn-free comment area labeled "teenagers" (for teenagers to discuss with each other, not for inappropriate images of teenagers, though reddit infamously had that too, and made a special "pimp daddy" trophy for the moderator that ran it), people would reasonably ask why a porn site has a kids section, and demand that even if the business wants to be in both spaces, the websites must be separated.