What’s the point of message requests?

It functions more as an “ignore” folder, really. “Message requests” is just a nice way of putting it.

You're a kid, so I think a lot of people just have it set to not accept messages from minors.

Hahaha

What's the point of a social media site if everyone's hiding in PMs?

Mostly because you don't get notifications from people that you haven't blocked already.

You can vet them out and block them afterwards if needed.

It shows intent.

I often forget requests are a separate page.

But think of it like a junk email folder. Enough users have had so much of a problem with random people messaging them that it eventually became a better idea to just send things to the junk folder and let users sort out the not junk items.