What? Nobody is asking someone to collect more information, in fact the solution is to collect even less information. How can you survey if you collect less?
I was agreeing with you that age verification is not the way to go, but your solution to "make the platform safe for everyone" would centralize the power to determine what is/isn't safe in the hands of the government and the tech companies. It's a legal excuse they could use to justify checking everything sent online and censor whatever they don't like.