As an autistic nerd without true technological and historical expertise, it’s very difficult to know what to think and disheartening to read others’ perspectives on this because instead of measured discussion, there is “bootlicker” and “surveillance state paranoia” being thrown around to dismiss the other side’s ideas and holy shit am I sick of the hostility and personal attacks here. I think both sides are plausible, don’t know which one is right, and it seems Lemmy is not going to be able to help me decide which one is more plausible.

I really hope you didn’t mean “raging autist nerds” in the derogatory 4chan way where a disability I didn’t choose to have is an insult, where people having strong emotions over a niche topic is something bad to mock and insult. Language is language, not everyone who has goodwill/is neutral towards a population knows the correct inoffensive language, etc. etc. but I have to admit “autist” in combination with its use in a phrase referring to people you don’t like, whose diagnosis status you don’t know, really makes me draw unpleasant conclusions.

I guess maybe this is a lesson that no matter how knowledgeable I think public forum users are, heated topics will include people being dismissive and insulting others unless there is very heavy moderation in place to keep things civil, and that I have to find somewhere else to find knowledgeable people giving their interpretation of information.

I agree to some degree, but I think the issue of age verification is beyond this point. Yes, Linux users tend to be much nerdier and reactive than the general public. But they are the ones who use linux in the first place. Whether they gatekeep linux from others is another story, but the devs should know their audience by now - and hopefully care. And what’s more - a lot of idealists (I wouldn’t call them autistic, though that may be a factor) hate systemd in the first place. They already dont use it or don’t want to use it. So the ones that do, I argue, are more mainstream. I am one of them. I don’t want to go back to sysvinit and write a script for each new service. I also know that this doesn’t end here. Today they add the field, tomorrow, some mainstream browser will depend on it existing and the frog will be boiled. Now it is not an API, but it’s added in case anybody needs it. So you didn’t even have to add it. And they didn’t add a gender field in case anybody needed it, for example. Yes, Linux community would probably start arguing about that, but not nearly as much IMO. I think this is far more mainstream issue than you give it credit, honestly.