Also in Aus here, using ISP DNS, not blocked. I think what you generally find is that most ISP's just don't do the DNS blocks, even if they're required to. Like you said, it's very easily circumvented and also it just doesn't lead to any measurable outcome other than the ISP customer's dissatisfaction in some cases. It's probably more profitable to retain the customers and deal with whatever regulatory blowback.

Can you quantify the difference? Far as I can tell, there's just an imaginary line where software becomes AI just because the logic filtering it depends on to operate is sufficiently complex. The term doesn't really seem to be a useful categorization either, e.g. the fundamentally different approaches of diffusion models and transformer models.

Aesthetics are the same bogeyman excuse used to justify really any significant change in a phone since IP ratings first came in with. I recall back when USB-C was first showing up in smartphones, there was a time where simultaneously some manufacturers were pushing for the change and others trying to push back on it, with both groups citing aesthetic reasons.