I think you may be underestimating the heavy investment in children's books WotC has been making for the past decade: the ABCs of D&D, the 123's of D&D, look and fund books, and the Little Golden Books are part of an intentional strategy to grow the next generation of players.
Based on how I see children reacting and interacting with D&D...you are right.
However, the VTT doesn't apply the rules, on purpose: the VTT as they have been showing it is built around facilitating DM fiat and houserules.
I had almost an inverse experience of this. I came into D&D about 1986, so at the tail end of AD&D 1E. And I quickly made the 2E transition (it came out I think when I was in 7th or 8th grade). We knew the name Gygax and who he was, but I didn't have those memories of reading his essays in Dragon (and if I did read them, I likely wasn't remembering who wrote them at the time). By highschool 2E was in full swing and, at least to my peer group, 1E was considered dated and hokey. And Gygax wasn't really on our mind (though the term Gygaxian slowly came to have some negative meaning in terms of gameable content and writing style). Now we did have the 1E books, so the material was there and we were familiar with and liked a lot of it. But I think things like the cartoon art and some of the gonzo elements weren't fitting what was in the air at the time (and being young people in highshool, what was in the air is what we thought was the best way to go). But later, after 3E came out and I started to tire of some of the adventure structures in 3E, but also didn't want to go back to those 90s adventure structures either, I bought the 1E DMG again for cents online and read it (initially because I thought it would have amusing and bad advice). But I found it was very engaging and it had a lot of content that was highly useable, and if not useable at least pointing me back in a direction where I was looking to go (I was tired of adventure paths, wasn't into things that felt railroady, didn't want to go back to heavy handed storytelling approaches from the 90s era, and wasn't all that into narrative style games, so I wanted something more open). I also have to say, people can say what they want about Gygax as he was strongly opinionated but the 1E DMG is a much better read than any of the other DMGs in my opinion if only because it has a conversational tone and the guy had personality. He may not have had the man's talent for words, but it was almost as if Norman Mailer wrote an RPG book. You might not agree with everything the guy says but he can hold your attention and make you laugh.
I thought those were just novelty products designed to appeal to current fans. Kind of like cute coloring books with Cthulhu. I think D&D is riding a wave of popularity and nobody is quite sure how or why it happened. Like in the 70s and 80s, D&D is lightning in a bottle only now it's hopefully better managed. It's very exciting that D&D is so popular, and while I like for it to remain this popular or get even more popular, I doubt that's going to happen. Players will age out, move on to other things, and they won't be replaced as quickly as they are lost.
There's a reason there were like half a dozen monk-like classes and kits over the course of 2e, until at the very end they released a proper monk class that was mostly a port of the 1e class in the Scarlet Brotherhood sourcebook.
No, they are legit kid-oriented products, and my kids eat them up. If you check the charts, they are selling well, too. That's how WotC is targeting the "aging out" phenomenon: people "age in," too.
Maybe they'll be successful. I have my doubts, but in 10 years maybe they'll have even more people. Games Workshop did the same thing by introducing a line of fiction for kids aged 8-12.
Games Workshop pretty aggressively markets primarily to younger players, not longterm players. WotC isn't going quite so hard into it, but genuinely child focused D&D products have been huge in the past 10 years: cute owlbears, Young Afvebturer booklets, choose your own adventure stufff..all very focused on the next generation who will play the game.
