Of course not. But literally any excuse that comes to hand will be deployed if it helps the tech industry continue to avoid meaningful consequences. The same handful of companies that have engineered a global surveillance suite that rivals the most tyrannical sovereign governments wildest dreams (and can trivially detect the approximate age of a user) will without a shred of irony deploy legions of paid influencers and other astroturf to decry age verification as an assault on privacy.
But it is an assault on privacy. If "protecting kids" was the goal here they'd push for regulation that forces websites to return standardized metadata that then gets interpreted by the user agent which can be configured by the parent.
Nah, that's a perfectly fine technical solution. Powers that be don't think like that. They understand pulling someone over to check their license, so something like that will do.