I completely agree. Gerald Friedland--a programmer/CS researcher--wrote a good article about how he used BASIC and a Commodore 16 for his daughter to learn programming, because it was just so much more straightforward than a modern computing environment. Most of coding teaching tools we have these days are gamified programming "simulations." You can learn some concepts like basic control structures, but you're not really creatively creating a program.

Incidentally, there is a block-based MakeCode interface that kids can use for "hacking" Minecraft--fun, but again not full-on programming. But my current favorite experiment with my daughters is giving them mini pages & puzzles to modify in JavaScript using CodePen.