> There aren't really transferrable skills here that would empower somebody to rapidly figure this sort of thing out if they just rearranged how their thought process worked.
Which is just false. There are transferable skills to achieve that.
Also troubleshooting is not the only way to achieve the goals. She could have just chosen a different tool, that doesn't come with a ton of baggage like Python does, if troubleshooting is too much of a bother. There are a lot of tools out there that could be used to select certain page range from pdf and save it as another pdf.
On Linux, I run:
pdfseparate InputFile.pdf InputFile-%d.pdf
When I said "there aren't really transferrable skills here" I mean that learning to think algorithmically will not transfer to being able to resolve these sorts of configuration problems.
Your final suggestion is similar here. Nothing about "learning to think algorithmically" helps you know that there is some tool already installed on linux that can do this. That's trivia, not logical reasoning. One can learn the trivia, but we should recognize that this is a necessary step towards making programming a daily part of many peoples' lives.
I agree that "learning to think algorithmically" will help someone apply programming language skills about as much as learning just English language grammar and very little vocabulary, will help someone apply English. Not much.
So now in order to do some simple scripting I need to run strace and look for syscalls? Why would anybody just know this? Oh, and she has a windows machine. So this is precisely the sort of useless advice that is widely available online. "Don't worry, you can always just learn how your entire dependency management package works on the inside and interacts with your operating system if you run into problems scripting something for your job" is not helpful. It is the sort of thing that makes people flee screaming from the very idea of doing anything more general-purpose than excel.