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Notes -
To play Devil's advocate for a second (I too think 21 is unnecessarily high), maybe the point of 21 is that it makes 18 easier to enforce. Here the drinking age is 18, and alcohol was a normal part of my life from around the time I was 16. Normal as in my parents wouldn't have any problem if I drank alongside them for meals of social gatherings, I would go out to bars with friends and order alcohol without anyone bothering me, and whenever there was a party my friends and I would always manage to have beer case one way or another (family/siblings buying for us, one of us having a fake ID, etc...). I don't think I could have gotten into bars pretending to be 21 at 16. Maybe people were more lax with it back then too though, it felt to me like the rule was that as long as the ambiguously aged late-teen young adult seems the discreet type they wouldn't bother checking ID.
You're right, in that much of purpose was to split away from High School friend groups. Everyone in high school has friends age 18, few have close friends age 21+. When I was in high school, from 15 onward I could have gotten an 18 year old to buy me cigarettes, it wasn't until after I graduated that I could reliably acquire alcohol.
The results of all this are kind of uneven and mixed. As a kid it was easier for my peers, or me though I didn't at the time, to smoke weed than to drink alcohol, weed was already illegal so the dealers didn't card, and it's easier to transport than alcohol. Good kids, like me, basically didn't drink in high school, the bad kids who did want to drink found ways to, and it meant interacting with real shitbirds of adults who would help them get it. I'm sure there's a lot of bad people who make a habit of preying on minors looking for booze.
I'd love to see it set at the municipal rather than the state level, using the same techniques. No state government can turn down government highway funding just to let 18 year olds drink. But a city? Say, a beach town like Asbury Park, which would benefit from attracting 19 year olds to party? Or a college town like Ithaca, which would be able to better regulate student drinking if so much of it wasn't technically illegal?
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