I think there are actually several reasons why this is a likely direction:

1. Children (duh, this article)

2. Misinformation (accountability, no astroturfing)

3. Misinformation Robots (age verifying robots is a difficult task)

4. Malicious Robots (do you need Cloudflare if you have an Age ID Firewall?)

5. Scraping Robots (nothing prevents scraping like knowing who to sue...)

6. Hackers (nothing prevents hacking like knowing who to sue, even if it's only 80% of the time...)

7. AI Use / Abuse (anonymity is a dangerous thing with AI)

Etc. To be honest, if I was an Age ID verification company, I'd be calling around to my competition to figure out how to develop some kind of interoperability standard; in the hopes that would make age-restricted services much more convenient and thus widespread. Now if they could get Billing integrated into the system as well, then we're cooking with gas.