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No.169487
In short: this is age attestation (an admin declares "this account belongs to someone born on X date") rather than full remote age verification (ID upload, facial scan, etc.). It's infrastructure, not the enforcement mechanism.
Can it be easily hacked around / removed?
Yes, trivially for anyone comfortable with Linux.
Just ignore it → By default the field is unset/empty. Nothing breaks. You never have to populate it. Most apps won't care.
Patch it out → It's one small addition to the source code. Community forks already exist that delete the birthDate field entirely (e.g. "liberated systemd" or similar GitHub forks).
Distro level → Any distro can apply a one-line patch before building the package. Arch users are already filing requests for this; some smaller distros have said they won't use it. Major distros (Ubuntu, Fedora, Debian, etc.) will probably ship the upstream version by default, but patching is straightforward.
Avoid systemd entirely → Void, Devuan, Artix, Alpine, Gentoo (OpenRC), antiX, etc. are completely unaffected. This is the cleanest "hack" for people who hate the direction systemd is going.