Laws can easily have exceptions for these things. In China for instance “non approved” VPNs are illegal, but there are plenty of legal VPNs as well.

For instance businesses can get approval for their own VPNs, and regular people can use some free/paid VPNs within the country, but presumably the government can see all of the traffic within those.

My prediction is that this is more about banning VPNs than about age verification. Start with this, then when everyone is “using VPNs to break the law” they have an excuse to ban VPNs.

Governments world wide likely see VPNs as incredibly dangerous. Plenty of examples of countries like Iran cutting off the internet entirely to prevent protests from organizing.

I think they want their own great firewall.