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I like this post, but I'd like to also note that legal independence is only a component of this; given extended childhoods and more young adults living with their parents and so on, we honestly can't use this as the Only True Standard for legal propriety(?). I've seen, for example, trans adults stuck at home with lower-income families whose parents are pretty much the polar opposite of them politically, having to conceal their voting records and other non-political activities, trapped either for want of their own home or to ensure their parents are still taken care of.
So, this is to say that legal independence is a good measure (and as you allude to, we determine voting age from age of majority/adulthood, which we in turn derive from a mixture of vague socio-cultural ideas and neurobiological evidence), but if you're really concerned about the "parents coercing their kids" angle, turning 18 doesn't magically free the new voter from social pressure.
It's not magic, it doesn't fulfill the task perfectly, but again, the cutoff has to be somewhere. Having a predefined, unambiguous, and fair method for the cutoff is better than tests which might correlate better with some things but open up others to accusations of or actual corruption and bias that unfairly disenfranchises some groups more than others. So having a single age at which people get to vote is a good method to accomplish this, and among all of the ages, 18 seems like the logical choice. If we somehow came up with a reasonable measure for social coercion on someone's vote, and averaged it over people at each age, there would be a discontinuous jump around the 18th birthday, maybe slightly afterwards when people leave home for college. It would not be absolute, it might even show that the jump would even be smaller than the total increase summed through ages 12 to 16, but age 18 would have the highest derivative on average because of the legal rights it represents. An 18 year old might still live with their parents and face social coercion, or they might not, and if the coercion gets too bad they can leave. A 16 year old is legally stuck with very few exceptions.
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