You are absolutely right! I used to be one of those kids that learned machine code and BASIC while still in primary school. But technology evolves and expectations grow. That is why we need better tools all the time.
This is a blog post telling the story of Allcancode that started with a coding game featured in code.org and played by millions of kids around the world and then transformed to a tool provider that streamlines software development.
it apears they have not entered the market nor created a prototype yet though. maybe the next pivot will be a platform where designers can find developers. youre very lucky as a dev to find a good designer and vice versa.
If it is being proposed as a new way of doing general software development, yet it could not create the system itself, then it has clear and profound limitations. Most markedly in the case of visual programming paradigms, it means they haven't solved the problems that have tripped up visual programming all along - what happens when things get complex?
The approach of encapsulating things to present bundles of code as a black box is a good one, but it needs to be paired with a powerful navigation interface that allows flying down into those black boxes pretty instantly, and figuring out how you can be viewing the internals of those alongside the 'outer' code at the same time to understand how things are interacting when things go wrong.
Millions of kids learned how (and how not) to code using it. Many of them gained a career as a result.
Unfortunately kids in the future had to do without it. Because there were a -thousand- 'better ideas'.