I'm not saying that this more conservative/cautious style of parenting has no value, or even that it is on net the wrong approach. I'm saying that it has costs of its own that are important to recognize and potentially devastating.
> The struggles of single parenthood for both the child-rearing parent and the children of divorce are very real and well-documented
The question isn't "does it suck to be a single parent or the child thereof". It's "is it worse than the alternative?" This is "people who see a doctor are more likely to die"-style reasoning that conflates a preexisting problem with an imperfect solution.
Kids need examples of loving and trusting relationships. That's how they learn how to build them themselves. They learn conflict resolution, compromise, and communication by observing their parents' relationship. And when that relationship is at best one of civil distance, a child can't learn what they need to learn. It's even worse when - as in my case - the kid is the channel through which a lot of the marital conflict plays out.
When my parents finally did split up (after I was already an adult), it was a relief to everyone involved. They're both better off. If they ever tried to get back together, I'm pretty sure I and my brothers and sisters would go slap them and tell them to not do the dumb thing.
> Keeping you away from illegal drugs meant you had the opportunity to get properly prescribed and managed psychiatric medication instead of the too-common path of self-medicating with the recreational drug-du-jour, with much worse long-term consequences.
Yes, but you're leaving out the part where unmanaged mental illness almost killed me before I got on properly prescribed and managed psychiatric medication. In almost every timeline but this one, it probably did kill me.
> You know the YOLO fad passed so quickly because kids realized the permanent scars left by “experimenting”, especially if there are no rich parents to pick up the pieces.
I take a different lesson from this. I think your point about "no rich parents to pick up the pieces" is one of the reasons that millennials and zoomers are struggling: we/they've grown up in a competitive world that doesn't allow them room for normal human error.
Making mistakes - or the safety to make them - is a critical part of growing as a person. It's an investment, the same way a company invests in R&D. It pays dividends. But it has short term costs you can't pay if you're always trying to make ends meet.
Yes, there are experiments you shouldn't perform because their costs outweigh their benefits, but most youthful indiscretions are not irreversibly damaging. One way to tell is that many of the richest and most powerful people around had fairly wild youths and tended to be fairly aggressively risk-taking.