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There's nothing in either the tradcon nor the progressive nor the liberal worldview that has any inherent problem with child sex as a concept.
On one end, you have... well, everything before the early 20th century, where the age of consent was somewhere in the single digits (if it even existed at all). This was necessary, because if a family fell on hard times and had some girls, that is what they would be encouraged to do: get married to someone who could actually afford to feed them (no welfare state and the church-run orphanage is a week's ride). Then you have the religious angle, where Christianity has its barely-teenaged Mary expecting a child (something normal enough in those days, though certainly an edge case in more than one way), Mohammed's wife of some single digit age, and the Mormons who, if you go deep enough into Utah or Montana, get busted for doing this every so often. Even as late as the '80s, "marrying one's rapist" was acceptable enough.
Thus, empirically, this concept is compatible with the tradcons.
On the other end, you have the progressives, where the only sex they care about preventing is that which occurs between men and women. Note that all the high-profile examples of "sexualized" children (Desmond, Jazz Jennings) are biologically male, the lack of literature portraying heterosexual (it is rare they involve women in any way, really) child/adult pairings, protecting (and in some early cases, actively facilitating) rapists so long as they're not straight, and so on.
Thus, empirically, this concept is compatible with the progressives.
And then you have the liberals, who are the entire reason we're even having this conversation in the first place and are the first to brag about having had sex-while-child (there was one in this thread already, most of the loose '70s were spent promoting this, and provided you're of a sexuality compatible with the progressive memeplex you're still generally allowed to say "had sex as teenager, 10/10" and have the news media nod along).
So, yeah. Economics and social developments downstream of that enable this taboo (itself a logical extension of the "kids aren't allowed to do literally anything and must be segregated and kept indoors 24/7, because otherwise they'd get seduced by the pedos and end up buried in the woods" trend of the '80s), but beyond that there's as much factual backing for it as there was for taboos like miscegenation and gay sex.
I think your case regarding "progressives" is weak and fails the ITT. The counterculture did include paedophiles, but when feminism/civil rights/gay rights/trans rights all glommed together into SJ, paedophiles were kicked out of the coalition. I was in SJ at the time; I know.
There is some crosstalk where SJ will cover up gay molestation because it is optimising for gay optics far too hard - but this is almost entirely seen internally as "necessary evil", not as "good". And it does go after gay molestation some of the time - most notably the whole "molestor priests" issue where there's no chance of it splashing back on SJ.
I went looking for this video I saw way back where an obviously-SJ woman basically spends 10 minutes saying that paedophiles are horrible creeps even if they don't molest, but I can't find it; sorry.
Now, as for explanation: I think ultimately it goes back to whenever May-December started to be considered "creepy", and the dynamics are the result of six-Haidtian-foundation people who don't like "creepy" (who are AFAICS the core of both tradcons and SJ; SJ is fairly-frequently and, I think, correctly, theorised to be "what happens when you feed counterculture liberalism to six-foundation people who would otherwise have been conservatives") plus the giant superweapon pointed at anyone who's willing to stand up and defend "creeps" in the open.
Indeed. This isn't a good refutation of "the only sex progressives hate is that which occurs between a man and a woman", though.
Again, the fact gay child sex gets a special pass in the first place is the central issue. The fact of the matter is that they not only accept it but outright encourage it (because any possible negative effects are confined to the groups they hate anyway) and they have shown they won't change should they manage to take absolute power given how they have acted once they have it (where they actively excuse even straight child rape gangs provided the perpetrators pass a paper bag test).
As such, child sex remains compatible with SJ; whether the average adherent sees that as an end in itself or not is irrelevant (as it is with the tradcons).
I think SJ (and its resulting success) is "what happens when you feed justifications for a supremacy movement to people in a zero-sum socioeconomic environment". Which is not the sole bailiwick of SJ; they just happen to be the dominant banner under which to perpetrate it these days.
I do wholly agree that the same people who are SJs today would have been activist Christian Rightists 40 years ago, and that those groups have the same moral foundations.
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