You'd be surprised how often veteran developers fail to grasp intermediate Unicode concepts (surrogate pairs, for instance) probably since they skipped over (or was not curious enough about) implementation details of such abstractions.
> Needlessly hiding technical details from kids is going to limit their learning.
I watch kids learning circuitry via redstone in Minecraft on iOS and Xbox - walled gardens, yet impressive learning nonetheless.
But when I was his age, all I had was MS-DOS 3.3. And I had to CD around to various directories, DIR *.EXE to remember the names of executables, etc. It was an environment that exposed more technical details, and kids who are predisposed to learn technical details learn a lot just by using it. Windows 10, doesn't promote the learning of technical details to anywhere near the same extent.
(I try to make up for it a bit. I introduced him to DOSBox.)
It is a mistake to conflate “it was harder for me” with “I learned more”.
My kids can program more complicated stuff in Minecraft than I could at their age. Part of that is having a tool that’s fun and abstracts away the boring bits.
What is "boring" varies from person to person.
I know, when our son plays Minecraft Java Edition, he likes to play it with the debug screen (F3) on.
He doesn't understand what most of the details on that screen mean, although he is learning a few. (He was asking me to explain what X, Y and Z coordinates were.) But, even if he doesn't understand most of it, he still likes it, and probably sooner or later he'll ask me more questions about it.
But the point is not that he memorises the ASCII table. The value is that he learns that computers internally represent letters/punctuation as numbers. The underlying concept is what's important, and the learning of specific values is mainly useful as a way of learning and reinforcing that underlying concept.