My wife has recently joined board of directors for a local non-profit helping victims of childhood sexual abuse. They are not religious or pornography prescriptive - they are liberal atheist whose entire focus is essentially sessions to help people who are currently adults and carrying baggage and impact of dreadful acts committed to them decades ago.
Anyhoo, The current "state of the art", as-scientific-as-we-currently have it findings are that for pedophilia, consuming content unfortunately normalizes and drives increasing urges, instead of giving them same outlet. It's a very very tricky area because current thought is also that pedophilia is "not curable" - it is sexual orientation thay we as society find unacceptable (me included, fwiw), so... Repression, wildly and rightly disawowed for other sexual orientations, is the current direction for pedophilia - I.e. Current thinking is that "victim-free" pornography consumption nevertheless tremendously increases actual risk to actual kids in the vicinity of the consumer.
Until relatively recently I was the technologist on a highty horse about online freedoms and largely still very much am. But in this specific area I've also had some semi personal experiences with pedophiles and my level of empathy to them has dropped to near zero and my level of empathy toward their victims has gone even further through the roof. Sometimes in technologist circles we think of this as edge case not worth consideration, but reality, very very unfortunately, is much much darker.
Don't get me wrong : I'm pro pornography freedoms, think it'd be huge fun to have a sexy high quality chatbot, and I find vast majority of those railing against it to be hypocrites with dishonest ulterior motives - and don't get me started on all the tangential "for the children" crap that religious rights tries to enact, as opposed to actually help children and families ;-But to the question of "is harmless pornography Indulgence better for paedophile and society", current thinking is "very much no".