I'm possibly very wrong about this, but this is an angle I haven't heard yet. I first noticed the pedophila moral panic emerging at around the same time there was increased mainstream discourse into consent and feminism. Somewhere between 2005 and 2015, that timeframe. A lot of it was reemerging feminist discourse that had been going on since the 1970s though. That's around when a lot of folk might have heard "rape culture" for the first time. It's when there was a lot more media criticism about depictions of women. There was a lot of discourse in that time too about sexualizing minors, but from a more sensible angle, not these bizarre child kidnapping conspiracy theories.

A lot of what American conservative paranoia does is latch onto ambient feelings to twist them, re-normalize them to better serve standard American bigotry. In this case I think white suburban ideology latched onto the ambient growing concerns about consent, boundaries, women's empowerment, all of that, and did trial and error twisting it until landing on something indefensible: Pedophiles. Surely pedophiles don't respect consent. They're the worst type of person imaginable, and they tap into that growing discourse. But instead of the discourse focusing on anything liberatory, or talking about patriarchy, or white supremacy, it became a way for conservative ideology to express ownership over children. It's repackaged queerphobia too, like you said.

It has to be connected to conservative ideology worried about children too. Each of the moral panics in previous decades centered around the autonomy of young people set upon by some social shift.

The 60s hippies were kids who rejected things like the Vietnam draft, or rejected the suburbanization they were destined to be a part of. The 80s were a reaction to more women entering the workforce, relegating childcare to daycares or babysitters. You'll notice that was reflected in the media too. So many of 80s horror movies are about children left alone in their suburban home while the middle class parents are out, while a working class coded murderer stalks the neighborhood with a big knife. There was a general panic about children being unaccompanied or being left with strangers. The Satanic Panic was a panic over what might be going on in daycares, now that more women were workers instead of rearing children all day.

And now in the 20s, more children are expressing autonomy through the internet. You can't control who your kid is in contact with anymore or what they're reading. But who knows where that leads, so the panic is all about brainwashing or secret cults or scary people in masks who will kidnap your kids in the Wal-Mart parking lot.