I feel like the EFF has stretched a bit far on this one. They need to be advocating for good solutions, not portraying age verification as fundamentally about surveillance and censorship.
As many are pointing out zero knowledge proofs exist and resolve most of the issues they are referring to. And it doesn't have to be complex. A government (or bank, or anybody that has an actual reason to know your identity) provided service that mints a verifiable one time code the user can plug into a web site is very simple and probably sufficient. Pretty standard PKI can do it.
The real battle to be lost here is that uploading actual identity to random web sites becomes normalised. Or worse, governments have to know what web sites you are going to. That's what needs to be fought against.
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