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This is because people use OPOL to mean two different things that you seem to be conflating together.
The point of the stricter version, where parents will avoid speaking the other language, is to avoid confusing small children and to help them distinguish between the two languages. You want them to speak proper English and proper Chinese rather than a random mixture of the two. But they should have that down well before the age of 6. It's not about compromising, it's just already served it's purpose and isn't needed anymore.
When the kid is older, "one parent one language" just means that you use your own language when you're talking to them one-on-one. Family discussions are in whatever language is convenient.
Lee Kuan Yew found out the hard way that this is almost impossible to impose top-down. It might work for a European language, but not for something as dissimilar to English as Chinese.
That's at the population level. It's different for a child with native-speaker parents from both languages.
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You're drawing a distinction that nobody I know applies and that I have not seen applied on the subreddit. The people I am seeing have kids who fully understand the distinction between languages and that some people speak one language but not another.
I haven't seen anyone explicitly making the distinction before, but people definitely mean different things when they say One Parent One Language, and I've only ever seen the "actively avoid speaking the other language in front of the child" kind when the children are toddler / pre-school age. Plus my description mirrors what we did ourselves and what some other mixed families I know did.
Perhaps the difference is that the minority language here is English, so making sure children grow up fluent has obvious practical benefits rather than being something for Reddit language enthusiasts?
It's not about avoiding speaking the language in front of the kids. It's about avoiding speaking the language to the kids.
Happy to provide a counterexample. There's many such cases, this is simply the first result I found with kids older than 6.
Fair enough, I agree that's kind of crazy. But I stand by most of what I said - I've never seen such a thing in real life and I don't think that's because the people around me are unusually well-adjusted. I continue to believe that most "OPOL" families are far more relaxed about it than the posts you're seeing on Reddit.
Yes, it’s important to remember for these kind of conversations that active Reddit posters are a fairly small portion of users; most posts are made a small portion of super-active posters; and most of those people are genuinely insane. Over-indexing on what redditors are up to is basically selecting for the beliefs of a particularly deranged subculture of a subculture.
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