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It seems like an easy way around this is to sell gift cards and only allow gift card payment for the adult content.

It's not, because PayPal/Mastercard et al blacklists the company, not the products. If they decide they don't want to be associated with you, they won't be. They will block all transactions from you regardless on if the purchaser is buying porn or potatoes.

The shortcut is to accept Amazon gift cards, which are a sort of black market currency already, but this is a lossy pain to launder out to real money.

No, that's even worse. Now you're paying more money for a worse solution. Imagine A) the per sale loss and B) the amount of lost sales from non-porn-buying customers that rightfully don't want to do that.

The right solution is what they're doing - finding a sane payment processor to work with.

Edit for clarity:

Stripe came over to them and said "if you have NSFW stuff for sale, we will not process any of your payments." The majority of revenue for itch is SFW content. If they start selling them for gift cards or points or whatever, Stripe will cut their revenue to 0.

It makes no sense to rush development of an alternative stopgap measure that is worse financially for you than the status quo.

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