> Meanwhile my sister's first programming course at university involved making a game using an existing bespoke framework.

I had exactly the same exercise on my first day on uni, we had to take some robot maze pathfinder game and adjust the algorithm a bit.

As someone who had been writing code for over a decade at that point (but who was unfamiliar with Java), I still remember it was intimidating.

I cannot imagine how it must have felt for people without prior coding experience.