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Notes -
PornHub (or more specifically MindGeek, the parent company) has long been maneuvering to monetize and potentially monopolize the age verification services in the UK, so their preferences for a specific framework of age verification is probably not motivated solely by principle or interest in protecting children or even themselves.
More generally, there is a tradeoff here: where server-level enforcement requires every server to behave, device-level safe searches require very strict limits on how a device can be used and how heavily it can be sandboxed. iOS 'solves' this by running nearly anything related to web functionality through Apple's browser, and the extent it doesn't or can't due to app functionality have lead to a ton of Apple's decision-making driving the rest of the world into censorship regardless of age (cfe tumblrpocalypse). This is kinda okay for phones, where most parents just want their kids using them as phones and maybe a few limited other uses. But doing the same for desktop would be a massive undertaking, and one with major repercussions and a huge lockdown on the ability to run (or write!) unvalidated code. JonSt0kes has written on the AI variant of this problem from a social conservative view, but it's far more general than MLgen.
This is further augmented because you don't just need to protect your kids' hardware. If anyone in their classes are unblocked or is able to bypass the blocks, flashing other students with stuff those other students weren't even looking for is a common attack/bullying tactic -- and that's something that seems much worse.
Kinda. iOS has an automatic birthday-based approach and a manual selection, but it's very similar in level to Google SafeSearch -- not just hard to know what will be blocked, and fairly arbitrary, but even once something is blocked it's hard to know why. Android just uses SafeSearch directly, though in turn it's less effective since Android is less locked-down by default.
More effective approaches are usually going to involve domain- or IP-level blocks enforced at a router level, along with blocking tunnel- or vpn-like connections, but that's still nowhere near perfect, and they can only cover limited areas.
I'd also note that they might chase something porn down: an alternative to looking for it elsewhere to look instead for something that falls through the cracks. There's a lot of people who got into vore because all of the obvious 'normal' sex stuff was the sort of thing that was unacceptable to examine or consider, and even when they escaped physically that they didn't really stop getting distracted by it, for something at the milder end of the scale. Nothing wrong with a vore kink itself, but I doubt it's better as an introduction to sexuality.
There are problems well before leaks. I'm old enough to remember when Corbin Fisher used some pretty aggressive legal threats and threats of outing to go after people who torrented their porn -- and it made me a lot more cautious about who got my address, name, and age moving forward, since they were one of the first I ever subscribed to.
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