Here's Chatroulette's login screen:
And from Archive.org, here's how Omegle's looked when the girl who is now suing them joined the site. "Tiny text" isn't an exaggeration. The call to action to start a text chat is a 200x50 button -- the 'don't use if you're under 13' text is 0.75em font:
It should be obvious to everyone, not just 'some lawyer' that the former is more of a barrier than the latter. There's also the concept of overt acts in many statutes - lying to a website by clicking a button that says "I'm over 18" when you're not demonstrates that you read the disclaimer and disregarded it, where you can plausibly claim you never saw the copy when it's just legalese on the bottom of the page.
The BBC article above states that Omegle is being mentioned in 50 pedophilia cases in the last 2 years. If 20% of kids would be scared to click "I'm older than 13", that would be 10 cases fewer.
We shouldn't just take zealous well-paid lawyers as a fact of nature. If those "defense against lawsuits"-actions actually don't make a difference in terms of reducing child abuse, then we should not let them make a difference in the legal system either.
That's assuming the evidence I would like to actually see.
Age limits can have a perverse effect on kids, or even young adults, eager to prove to themselves and their peers how "mature" they are. Retail stores and clubs where I live have exploited this for a long time.
For instance, there is no government-imposed limits on the age you need to be to buy energy drinks, but the grocery stores have coordinated to institute a 15 year limit. I'm pretty sure they do this simply to increase sales, not over concern for overcaffeinated kids.
They also used to have big signs saying "Over 18? PROVE IT!" with a big foaming glass of beer. I'm sure that flew over the head of most adults, but there was nothing about showing ID there.
Chatroulette, the one most similar to Omegle, like Omegle, was started by a teenager alone (at about the same time), with the additional advantage (from the point of vulnerability to civil liability) of being in Russia.
But even so, they very early on faced the same kind of criticism as Omegle, shifted to registration-required and adults-only very early on, had an easier way to report inappropriate content, automatic temporary bans for too many reports too close together, and adopted other mitigations beyond what Omegle has.
Over the years, the handful of times I’ve gone on CR, I’ve never seen any form of required registration or age verification beyond maybe an “I’m 18+” checkbox or something.