This simple block is relatively trivial to bypass - but if they disappear tomorrow, a lot of things break.
Tale as old as time, long-running forums are graveyards of dead Photobucket, Tinypic and Imageshack embeds. Imgur has lasted longer than most but the cycle will probably repeat eventually, especially since they were acquired by faceless corpos a few years ago.
government censorship
called it for what it is
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c4gzxv5gy3qo
If you follow the links to earlier articles you get to this one about fining TikTok: https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-65175902
"There are laws in place to make sure our children are as safe in the digital world as they are in the physical world. TikTok did not abide by those laws." ... "When you sign up you can be targeted for advertising, you can be profiled, your data contributes to an algorithm which feeds content," said the Information Commissioner.
So even before the OSA, the idea was: social media sites using algorithmic feeds must prevent children's access, and just asking "are you over 13" isn't enough. That's a demand for age verification, in practice.
They did a big data purge years ago, and were already enshittified almost a decade before that.
that made multiple forums I've been on rush to download everything to their servers