Companies could give students a special form of (e)sim card where the school could disable data and block calls that does not go to family, emergency services etc. during class, and then unblock it automatically when there are no classes.
I'm sure it's not as simple as suggested above, otherwise someone would have made it already. But perhaps there is a similar technical solution for this problem, as parents and schools are unable to fix it on their own.
Even if cast lists don't have copyright, they still need to source the data from somewhere. If I was responsible for this at Netflix, I would prefer to buy that data from a good quality source instead of scraping the data from external websites or running OCR on the credits screen.
If I was a cynical product owner who was responsible for the multiple profiles feature, I would probably fight to keep that extra click to remind users of the functionality. Otherwise it may affect the metrics.
BTW: My pet peeve is that it's not possible to mark an episode as "seen". They should at least allow it for those who use multiple profiles. If a family has profiles, but sometimes watch the same content together, it kind of locks you into using that profile forever for that show. It makes it harder to catch up on missing episodes on other profiles, and also messes up the interface in general.
I'm not familiar with how licensing works at that level, but I know there are a lot of licensing deals involved regarding music in the series and subtitles for example. It wouldn't surprise me if also meta data such as the movie cover and credits may need to be licensed separately for some markets.
My guess is potential licensing issues and/or cost reductions. I assume someone has done a competitor analysis and decided that the lack of such a feature will not cause significant churn and is not worth the time and effort (legal, financial, development time etc.).
Companies could give students a special form of (e)sim card where the school could disable data and block calls that does not go to family, emergency services etc. during class, and then unblock it automatically when there are no classes.
I'm sure it's not as simple as suggested above, otherwise someone would have made it already. But perhaps there is a similar technical solution for this problem, as parents and schools are unable to fix it on their own.