Hi! Someone who took several courses on the history of children's literature in uni here!
First off, The Hobbit is definitely 100% a children's book. And the reason we word it that way is that it was written with children as a primary target audience. That doesn't mean adults can't/won't enjoy it, but they're not who the author is writing for. But a good children's book, to paraphrase what Tolkien himself said, is a book that can be enjoyed just as much at 10 years old as it can be enjoyed at 50.
Part of the reason I think the person above is so vehement about the book not being for children is that it was first published in 1937, composed between 1926 and 1930, and written by a guy whose formative years were from the 1890s to early 1900s. Why is this significant?
Because until the Industrial Revolution, kids were believed to basically be mini adults, with the same psychological needs and interests as their elders. It's why, despite also being very much a children's book, the tales by the Brothers Grimm are extremely violent and don't feel very kid-friendly.
It wasn't until the mid to late 1800s that people really started to consider that content intended for kids might need to be written differently than for an adult audience. Treasure Island, one of the earliest books written "for children" instead of "for mini adults", only came out some 10 years before Tolkien was born.
Which is to say, when Tolkien wrote The Hobbit, he wrote during a time in which children's books were still making the transition of being what we think of today. So the style of the book can feel like it was written for an older crowd than it was intended for because it doesn't entirely fit our modern expectations of what a children's book entails.
It's not that children's books today are dumbed down, but rather that, as we have studied fields like child psychology and how the brain learns, we adapted the way children's books are written to better cater to our primary audience.
Books like A Series of Unfortunate Events, for example, use big words all the time, but the way they go about it is slightly different than how Tolkien might have done it. Which isn't to say that Tolkien's work is bad by modern standards, just different. In fact, I'd say that Tolkien's The Hobbit is a great kid-friendly intro to the style of writing one might find in Norse sagas when they're old enough to read the originals.
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