Ads are super effective. If you have something to buy, but you don’t know much about it, you will tend towards buying the thing that was advertised to you more often than not just because you are more familiar with it over other things. You might not stick with it, but being the first thing someone tries is huge.
Every company has learned that any friction to using your site is a bleed of customers. There are a lot of people who will just not use your site if it requires a lengthy validation process. If there was some kind of identity system that sites would integrate with like login.gov, then people would ignore this, but I don’t think the UK has such a thing that every site can use, so a lot of people will not use the site and over time fall to piracy or illegitimate sites.
I hope you got the therapy you clearly need. People drop off the internet for all sorts of reasons. I remember bleeding friends because a platform died. It’s just how it is. This can be their lesson learned that you actually need multiple ways to contact your digital friends.
If it were me, I would have been oh well too with my kid. Taking gambles like lying about your age sometimes doesn’t pay off. Sometimes your parents just up and move. Somehow I survived losing digital and IRL friends because of things I had no control over. Learning to cope with that is an adult skill that you everyone eventually needs.