I love games as an introduction to programming. But then you have to teach kids how to do collisions (or physics), you have to teach them how to keep track of multiple sprites that behave the same but are in different places at the same time (I'm talking about classes, yes), and it's harder to point to a "real world" usage of game programming... which makes it harder to get your course approved.

I know, teaching today's web standards means they'll be out of date within the next ten years. But I believe the improvement of the web is asymptotic and will slowly come to a halt in the coming years... that and I would never forgive myself for not refreshing a course when it's too old to be applied to the real world, as a pragmatist. Finally, I don't think Vue will beat React too quickly.

(I'm not an educator, but I've spoken with a few on some of these topics.)

I went to a private school, where the only CS class was game programming; and it was offered as an art elective [0]. The class itself was very much a programming class, requiring only a couple of supplemental lunch time classes to be prepared for the AP exam [1].

[0] According to the teacher, the class was originally planned as offering a CS credit; but was changed to art when they realized that a CS credit is not a graduation requirement, while art credits were.

[1] This was not out of the norm for my school. The only class that was designed for the AP was calculus.

When I taught myself basic as a child I did so by building my own single-user dungeon. In my first c class in high school the project was to create a playable terminal-based hangman game. Neither of these engaging projects required me to learn anything about physics or sprites. Though I did build an ascii-animated hanging sequence for those who lost at hangman.