Sounds like the people you describe were outliers with some preexisting conditions, and probably shouldn't be used as any sort of baseline or point of comparison.
Just to add my perspective, I am one of those outliers who is still going to therapy for porn/sex addiction that started in adolescence. Age verification wouldn't have helped me because addiction wasn't my main or only issue - I also had significant sources of stress owing to my upbringing. I could have just as easily been addicted to drugs or alcohol because of those stressors, or used a VPN. Either way I needed some form of stress relief beyond what any teen ought to need, and those were the options I saw.
Combination of abuse and unfettered access to drinks/drugs/Internet is way worse than either one alone. At the same time I think the issue of bad parenting is a) not one people talk about out loud because of stigma (we can attack tech CEOs all day for pushing addictive products but anyone can become a parent and none of them will stand to be called the "bad" one) and b) not amenable to much change save for a global in-house surveillance panopticon. Yes we can choose to place trust in parents to protect children from Instagram and PornHub, but consider that some parents just... won't. Neither can we force them to. What then?
I wouldn't think that since people who don't suffer from these issues outnumber those who do suffer, that makes this not a real issue. Consider the victims of opiate addiction, alcoholism, or sex trafficking. Are those situations so fundamentally different? How many people does one have to know with tragic childhoods for it to be a problem that people take seriously?
Combination of abuse and unfettered access to drinks/drugs/Internet is way worse than either one alone. At the same time I think the issue of bad parenting is a) not one people talk about out loud because of stigma (we can attack tech CEOs all day for pushing addictive products but anyone can become a parent and none of them will stand to be called the "bad" one) and b) not amenable to much change save for a global in-house surveillance panopticon. Yes we can choose to place trust in parents to protect children from Instagram and PornHub, but consider that some parents just... won't. Neither can we force them to. What then?