This sounds like the right answer at first, but really, the entire reason ID verification exists is because the whole “just parent your kids” thing already didn’t work, and now here we are. You can’t fix stupid, meanwhile the kids are still doing bad things, and everyone else doing nothing too, solves nothing.
This thread sums everything up nicely I think: https://lemmy.ml/post/98675/95459
And for programming.dev specifically, the API did not work for me when they had CF bot protection turned on (endpoints always returned the “Just a moment…” bot check html), it was only after it was turned off a few days ago that it started working for me, because CF doesn’t like my IP/browser/something and always gives me endless captcha loops. Previously their stance was that bot IPs had to be explicitly whitelisted to be allowed on their server.