Even in this thread there’s discussion of a show that blatantly tittilates the audience with underage characters that would absolutely qualify as csam in any other community except in the anime community, for some reason.

Emphasis mine. If what you are saying is indeed correct (is it? dunno), this is a sign that the acronym "CSAM" was completely derailed.

Originally the expression "child sexual abuse material" was coined to avoid implications of consent brought by the word "pornography", and it boils down to "evidence of child sexual abuse". Consent and sexual abuse are legal notions that only apply to real people, not to fictional characters.

In the meantime, at worst the instance in question depicts images of clearly fictional characters in suggestive poses and/or clothing. It does not classify even as pornography, let alone sexual abuse. (Note that not even hentai depicting clearly adult characters is allowed in that instance.)

I don’t care about what the maintainers’ view of the matter is, I make (and sometimes delete) my comments based on my own view of it.

Given that this is a touchy subject, I think that this matter is better handled neither by the maintainers' views nor by our own views, but by 1) legal definitions of governments that might be relevant in the matter, and 2) explicit moral premises.

I may have an extremely warped opinion on this due to several reasons (imo mostly due to irl encounters with adult people that would put you on a watch list due to how young they look) but I think in the end it usually boils down to anime/manga just being terrible media for portraying how old a character actually is. The oldest anime character you can draw will still look significantly younger than a person you meet irl simply because the art style hides a lot of the age marks.

Edit: which is not to say that there isn't a lot of CSAM hiding, it's just imo the stuff that gets popular on SFW platforms is rarely that stuff

If anime is child porn, then so is all live action media.