Yes because unaligned load is no problem with SSE/AVX. On my RISC-V OrangePi unaligned vector loads beyond byte-granularity fault so you have to take extra care.

AVX shift and shuffle is mostly limited to 128 bits unfortunately for historical reasons (even for 256-bit instructions) and hardware support for AVX512/AVX10 where they fixed that is a complete mess so it's hard to rely on when you care about backwards compatibility for consumer devices, e.g. in game development.

RISC-V vector has excellent mask/shuffle/permute but the performance in real silicon can be... questionable. See the timings for vrgather here for example: https://camel-cdr.github.io/rvv-bench-results/spacemit_a100/...

For working with packed data structures where fields are irregular/non-predictable/dependent on previous fields etc. unaligned load/store is a godsend. Last time I worked on a custom DB engine that used these patterns the generated x86 code was so much nicer than the one for our embedded ARM cores.

Unaligned load/store is crucial for zero-copy handling of mmaped data, network streams and all other kinds of space-optimized data structures.

If the CPU doesn't do it software must make many tiny conditional copies which is bad for branch prediction.

This sucks double when you have variable length vector operations... IMO fast unaligned memory accesses should have been mandatory without exceptions for all application-level profiles and everything with vector.

     I don't know if it's sheer stubbornness or they're just wired differently.

There is no long-term strategic thinking anymore, only feel-good policies and short-term cash burning for their respective clientele.

As a young person it infuriates me but there is nothing we can do.

If you don't keep and cross-reference documents it is really easy to circumvent, e.g. by kids asking their older siblings to sign them up.

I don't think a bulletproof age verification system can be implemented on the server side without serious privacy implications. It would be quite easy to build it on the client side (child mode) but the ones pushing for these systems (usually politicians) don't seem to care about that.