You can't have both open entry to anyone and having a preemptive filter to desincentivize entry for a group without gathering personal info, sadly.
Yeah, and those systems, in both the physical and digital realms, can't be perfect. Minors will slip through the cracks. However, in the context of sexual spaces specifically, it's still well worth it to have a mechanism to prevent predation imo.
People STILL cry about the Texas ID requirement for Internet porn, but if we were in a pre-Internet society then you'd need to show an ID to enter an adult shop and buy porn anyways. People apply the concept of privacy in a misguided manner in this context; it used to be reasonably accepted that privacy was something you had to wager to acquire pornographic content because it kept minors safe and dissuaded overconsumption. Sure, when you send your ID in to view porn, it's risky because it could become compromised and the fact you did something shameful could be used against you. That's not at all absent in the pre-Internet situation either; you could easily be spotted entering/leaving the adult shop, the cashier could hold your patronage against you, it's not perfectly safe either.
I feel like people get more sketched out by it in a digital landscape both because we've been spoiled with free access to porn for a lifetime now, and because of the additional uncertainty of the technological aspect of the process. However, the underlying properties of implementing these filters were the norm in the pre-Internet age and society was clearly better off for it. People could still end up pornsick back then, but it was fewer and further between, and it was far, far, far less normalized.
But it seems like the mainstream take is that all porn should be accessible by everyone with just a click on "of course I'm 18" because it's more convenient for adults to access porn that way, and that's what matters more to a lot of people.
