I read the whole excerpt you linked, and holy cows if you did not just significantly improve my base opinion about boot camps. The way you introduced AR is exactly the way I would do it, with the same digressions to hammer down things like "AR is ultimately just writing SQL for you", and "AR is ORM, there are many ORMs with different approaches", and "where does a concept live?", and "map is not the territory".
Here's a thread I posted the other day, though, that might be interesting to you: https://twitter.com/jfarmer/status/1127324440469970944
BTW, the evolution of your feelings is pretty normal and it brings back memories. Haha. People would always be like, "Uh, yeah, ok, so you're churning out code monkeys, right?"
Then we'd bring them in, show them what we were teaching and how we were teaching it, and they'd go "Oh man, I wish I had been taught like this!"
We’d explain it the way you described. We’d have them start with Sinatra apps after 3 weeks of modeling problems in CLI apps.
After their 10th hand-written form with error handling, they’d see the value of Rails form helpers immediately once they hit the last few weeks.
Similarly, they’d write lots of SQL queries by hand in their CLI apps. We’d push them to separate it behind method boundaries then class boundaries then build a mini-ORM.
When ActiveRecord came along it was no problem because they had a model of the problems it was invented to solve.
A bit of the flavor: http://bit.ly/dbc_activerecord
It’s always sad to hear that the bootcamps that followed us didn’t try to give students the right mental models, but I believe you!