Gatekeeping is trivially turned off by those who won't footgun themselves by dragging literal garbage from the Internet into their system. It is a good feature for most macOS users. They only care about your verification woes a tiniest bit, if at all. They need a walled garden, Apple gives one to them, it's a product-market fit, while power users are given a reasonable off-ramp.

The other issues are more serious, especially macOS 25, but again, how much of that deeply affects the vast majority of actual paying customers who buy Macbooks? As long as Apple learned their lesson and will do another one of those bugfix OS releases they've done before, no long lasting harm done.

Using credit cards for age verification is certainly dumb, but age verification is coming and most people see the need for it. You can disagree that there is a need for it (entirely different discussion), but you must acknowledge the broad support for it at least.