In this specific scenario i'm just as identified as much as the army of AI bots pretending to be people to give fake advertising money.
They need at least a "that's a real guy according to trustable company (tm)".

It's not about protecting the children and it will do nothing to protect the children.
The least evil theory i see floating around is that this is meant to create "identified people", so online advertising actually works.
Even if there's no actual data leak etc.. being an "adult" means you're a real human being possibly with a wallet.

If you can convince people to use computers instead of phones is already a pretty good step, as you can do a lot more on computers than on phones.

"Journalism" nowadays is just a bunch of biased people that spend the whole day on twitter instead of doing actual investigations and fact check.
So, people just go for the same thing but funny

Throwing away their only weapon (anonymity) would be quite dumb.

Unless they want to play a cat and mouse game with the designers, you just can't make something that can detect a 3D model of a gun 100% reliably, they would have to do a per model basis ban.

The flyby of the moon is good from a marketing standpoint, a "see? we still can send people there, it's not lost ancient tech", it will help people convince investors to well invest in this.
But turning one of the worst plagues for anyone actually landing on the moon into something very useful is great

Of course it requires a lot of RAM and CPU power and GPU power and...
Luckly, there are a shitload of options out there that use a lot less resources.

The consumer should be aware and buy things that are not in this situation.
And yes, everything you listed has some instances where the vendor's will override the consumer will. cars with components that are locked behind payment and can be disabled remotely, televisions that display advertising, game consoles that can do things like deleting games you own, security cameras that just go to shodan (the website), lightbulbs that require you to use your mobile device to "register"...
Not saying that EVERY CAR etc.. but there are examples of specific devices doing all that.

Your wallet is tiny next to the investors and shareholder's wallets

If you're buying a online computer you can't control what is installed on it, you should expect it to not work for you.

I did read somewhere that color was a massive kludge on it as well, due the original being very hard coded for B&W

Looking here, it do emulate a 16bit CPU, but i imagine, even via emulation, you're getting a CPU that is a hundred times faster than an actual 386 of that era.

Much of the Win95 compatibility depends on 16bit code, which is not available on the 64bit mode regardless of windows or linux.At this point, your best bet is using 86box

The part where the "age check" they will ask 4chan to use is some shady as fuck system to get face scans/ids for every user.
It has nothing to do with children, and it is being pushed on everything at once for a reason or two.