I don’t even know where this rumour came from.

It’s not a rumor, systemd merged a PR that explicitly said it was to allow handling the new age verification laws. Just because they aren’t actually verifying anything doesn’t mean that they didn’t merge code in direct support of the laws. And why in the world would this even be handled at systemd level anyway?

All of this was discussed in the PR.

Systemd is present on the vast majority of Linix systems so it made the most sense to put it in systemd. It is an optional field so it is up to applications and distros on weither to use it for something. Age verification laws are legally binding so compliance is not optional.

If you have a problem with age verification call your local lawmaker. Don’t attack a bunch of devs who somehow got stuck in the middle.