I hosted a party for some friends and their families yesterday and this also came up, particularly in regards to Roblox. It is possible to tune Roblox and make it safe for your kid, but is is a lot of work.

Fundamentally, tech companies are user-hostile because their growth, revenue, stock price, (and for some of them now, political power) depend on a shitty experience. Every tech company wants to automate other companies's products, but will use every tool available (including legal ones) to stop you, the user, from automating and controlling their product.

The examples are endless: Roblox creates a kids casino, but if you as the parent want a safer, saner experience for your kid you have to navigate endless settings and there's still tons of shit that falls through the cracks, so you have to manually oversee what they do and manually ban bad games. However, if you try to use automate this process for yourself, there's no API, or you'll get banned for screen scraping or atypical behaviour that triggers some automated system. Facebook aggregates other websites, becomes a centre of social life, then they'll shove endless slop at you, but if you try to use your own app or agent to create your own experience so you're not exposed to that, you get banned.

A while back I vibe-coded a little parental control for my kid's YouTube because I wanted to give him autonomy to choose his own stuff, but also make sure he's not watching crap. I took his YouTube history then had Gemini automatically watch, rank, categorize and flag things for me (https://github.com/drashkov/slopstopper), and the analysis was pretty great. But taking actual action (banning channels, automated runs) is a major pain, because YouTube fundamentally does not want me to be in control of my kids's experience, they guard their turf jealously.

IMHO, the tech arms race is doomed, things will keep getting worse until enough people are pissed off to demand political changes.