Britain's most tattooed man says UK's age check told him to "remove his face"

This was never necessary - Yoti (which I think is being used in this case) has a tool that allows you to validate your identity to them, and then use that to validate only that you're over 18 to third parties. Yivi (a Dutch non-profit) even has an open source version, and it works really well.

I have no clue why these "facial age estimation" technologies are being pushed in place of that. They're much worse in terms of privacy and accuracy, and they're easier to trick if you want to bypass them.