Sure, that is easy to do after you have them hooked up. But dead-simple installation is the only thing I care about when each extra click turns off another 20% of the newbies (made-up percentage). Especially if you want to present it as "a tool that you can use improve your main hobbies/interests", as opposed to something they should master. Pushing even further on this, when I show a PhD bio-engineer how to use Arduino to automate their bio-reactor, I am certainly going to use the two-click-to-setup Arduino IDE, instead of PlatformIO. The extra features are detrimental when all you want is to show a tool exists and can make your life easier and more interesting with minimum extra effort.

Is this a good summary:

PlatformIO for generation of value.

ArduinoIDE for demonstration of value.

Oh, sort of like why learn to ride a bike when you can just get a car or a moped?

Exactly the opposite. Learn the simple tool (the bike / the single click Arduino IDE) before expecting kids to know how an engine works. This is the most basic obvious principle in pedagogy.

Sure, but many kids won't have the patience to play with PIO. The Arduino experience to make a LED blink is literally connect the device, copy paste the blinker code into the big text box, select the device and port in the tools menu, click upload, done. That can be done in a few minutes without any of the kids getting too bored.