Prior to about 1995, the notion that people would surreptitiously trade naked pictures of kids was just alien to most people.

Lewis Carroll had a collection of nude pictures of little girls and wasn't secretive about it in the slightest. I'm not a fan of erotica of any kind, but the child variety has historically been considered much less vulgar than the adult variety.

The whole pedophilia thing is such an obvious psyop.

Honestly, it's not a psyop, but rather a mass hysteria. It was Freud who first came up with the theory that minors suffer psychological damage when they have sex with adults, but he later recanted it after realizing it had no substance. The discredited theory was adopted and weaponized by feminism in the 1970s, and has since been used to incite hatred against men who prefer teenage girls over aging and used-up career sluts.

From Skeptical Inquirer (Jul-Aug 2001):

Freud was the first to formalize a relation between CSA and psychological maladjustment. In his "seduction theory," he claimed that all adult neuroses are traceable to premature sex with an older person. He based this notion on a dozen or so patients, whom he pressured to recall seduction episodes using the same discredited techniques that would later be used in modern recovered memory therapy. He soon abandoned his theory, and it lay dormant until the women's movement of the 1970s, where it was revived by advocates and victimologists who found political and economic value in it for attacking the "patriarchy" and increasing a patient base.