Since people aren’t reading the article and the headline is misleading. The law requires:

• The OS ask the user their date of birth on account creation (kinda like the Steam date of birth prompts)
• The OS provide an API that returns which of four age brackets the user fits in
• Companies notified by the OS that the user is under age may be liable

It was explicitly written by the authors not to mandate ID or facial recognition checks. You can lie about your date of birth. This basically creates a standard set of parental controls for parents configuring kids devices.

I think that this might actually help with the whole discord facial recognition issue in places other than the UK by allowing them to offload the issue to parents setting up devices rather than collecting kids biometrics.