For those who are not allergic to Microsoft, visual studio is a beast but it is quite intuitive, has a UI for everthing, very easy debugging and auto-complete. I don’t think there is anything wrong with using a professional tool for kids if the few features they will use are easy to do in this environment. Of course I am less convinced any of the languages in VS is a beginner’s language (apart perhaps from VB but it is going away).
>apart perhaps from VB but it is going away
Even presuming it's gone zombie, it'll be 30+ years before it might scatter to the winds...
(And that's presuming that VBA is finally no longer a thing.)
In the meantime, some of these kids might someday make a living at maintaining VB codebases.
I wonder though, if the problem with existing platforms is in the environment and tooling, is a new programming language going to help? Wouldn't it make more sense to build better tools around one of the existing ones? Ones that are more "real deal", as you said? (e.g. TypeScript, Kotlin, Swift, ...)