I would be more sympathetic to YouTube's plight here if they weren't aggressively pushing addictive features like "Shorts" with no option to disable them.
But ultimately I can't see how a blanket law banning kids makes sense instead of a law banning the platform from targeting kids.
Give a 5 years old unlimited access to youtube and witness the cesspool it is. Nobody is saying youtube is 100% bad, but people who don't know better (kids for example) are easily manipulated in watching the most brain rot content you can imagine, for hours and hours. It's an ocean of shit within which you might find a few gems if you know what you want or if you get extremely lucky.
Content wise they used to be until very recently, what did I have access to as a kid before internet ? Some books from my parents, some booked from school, whatever was allowed on public TV when my parents allowed me to watch it, maybe the odd porn mag from the older brother of a friend of a friend. That's very tame compared to what you have access to from even heavily censored search engines like google
When I open yt I get an empty page with a search box, even clicking on the Shorts page it just says "Recommendations are off Your watch history is off, and we rely on watch history to tailor your Shorts feed. You can change your setting at any time, or try searching for Shorts instead. Learn more."
However, I feel like YouTube does a genuinely good job — at least for me personally — of curating my feed with videos I have genuine interest in; mostly being tech talks and home DIY.
I'd hate to lose the discoverability I currently have for the sake of having to disable a feature like Shorts.
Every time I hear some AI video my kids watching, it's a short.
99% of it seems to be AI voiceover slop. Probably all stolen videos with faked context. Ban it for everybody, nothing of value will be lost.