Now admittedly many of these things are unevenly enforced, but society absolutely does a lot in the physical world to make it appropriate for children.
> Long term, smoking rates have fallen 73% among adults, from 42.6% in 1965 to 11.6% in 2022.
> Long term, smoking rates have fallen 86% among youth, from 36.4% in 1997 to 3.8% in 2021.
I'd say that's better off, not just in childhood but with long term effects.
You're taking the metaphor a bit too literally.
Or maybe the metaphor is flawed?
GP says that public spaces are adult-only by default, the parent rightly points out this is nonsense: public spaces are Safe for Work (and for kids) by default, and you have to prove you're an adult to access the adult-only spaces. Which is exactly what laws like this are trying to do by analogy to the physical world.
It's not OP that's interpreting the metaphor too literally, the public-spaces metaphor is literally the main justification for these laws and GP doesn't understand how public spaces work.
The internet does have user agents, and for children the user agents are controlled by adults (and if the child has the cooperation of an adult, you already can't enforce age verification). So now you don't need anyone to prove their age in a way that has privacy implications and chilling effects because you can have the child's user agent notify the site that the user isn't an adult, rather than needing each adult having to prove who is. Which doesn't require any form of identification because it's just a flag the adult sets on the child's device. Therefore anything that does require identification is unnecessary and malicious.
Most adults would be put off by that as well, I’m not sure if this is indicative of public spaces.
That said, I agree that public spaces cannot possibly be adult only by default, as children have to traverse them.
I grew up in a household where no effort was made to hide adult materials. Oh, the horrors--that don't actually exist. There is exactly zero overlap between my father's kinks (I was the one that had to go through his stuff when he died, I know what they are) and my own.
As for the billboard--there's sometimes been a prostitute ad on a billboard here. "Full" nudity with strategically placed text. Of course it pretends they are dancers but few people are actually mislead. (Despite a fair amount of misunderstanding prostitution is *not* legal in Las Vegas. It's banned by state law in the two most populous counties, local choice otherwise. However, there's pretty much a truce between the outcall escorts and the police--they don't do other wrongs, the cops don't try to catch them.)