I'd agree that the current educational models for programming aren't the most effective, but I don't think any superior alternatives have been proposed or been

I'd agree that the current educational models for programming aren't the most effective, but I don't think any superior alternatives have been proposed or been made available. If someone developed a superior alternative then they would probably be able to quickly out-compete a bunch of companies, and eventually that new model would become widespread. Personally I think that current platforms have too many layers of cruft that has never been cleaned up, so people have been forced to continue building bad abstractions on top of everything. We need base layers that integrate the lessons from the last couple of decades. For all of the faults with the Web and tools like Electron, they've helped enable a massive amount of people to ship real useful software. Ideally there would be superior alternatives to something like Electron while still remaining accessible. One interesting example is ImGUI; I tried it out a while back and was amazed by the level of performance, but still had to deal with a lot of useless details related to build tools and cross-platform idiosyncrasies.