No, governments caused the issue by demanding customers to ID themselves, while failing to provide the necessary tooling for doing so in a secure manor.
There's really only a few countries in the world who can provide the services needed to make this work. On top of my head, Estonia, Sweden and Denmark (there's probably others).
No, the problem is in the requirements already, not only in the implementation.
I don't want to ID myself if it isn't necessary. Proven security mechanism to minize data collection. It is a security risk, even with ZKP. It wouldn't even be hard to correlate the data, especially since governments also force ISPs to save connection info.
There is no need to a foul compromise here.
There’s no unbreakable secure tooling, none. It might be unbreakable against script-kiddies level of hacking, even though I have my doubts even about that, but Snowden and the general atmosphere during the last decade or so have proved that State actors can put their hands on almost any piece of data out there, either through genuine hacking or other means involving their monopoly on violence.
It’s absolutely possible to verify something anonymously.
Here was an interesting example recently https://help.kagi.com/kagi/privacy/privacy-pass.html
You missed my part about State actors and their monopoly on violence. I think it used to be called the “hammer metaphor” or some such, a not very technical solution, if at all, but more than efficient nonetheless.