It's depressing, but it's probably the only way. And people will presumably still sell out their RealIDs to / get them stolen by the bot farmers anyway.

And then there's Worldcoin, which is universally hated here.

Of course. You'd still need ongoing federal government support to handle the lost/stolen ID scenario, of course. The problem is federalist countries suck at centralized databases like this, as exemplified by Musk/DOGE completely pooching the "who is alive and who is dead" question when they were trying to hackathon the US Social Security system.