Prototype based inheritance vs class based inheritance will confuse exactly zero new people, since they will have zero prior experience with class based inheritance. Heck, if the goal is to teach algorithmic thinking and imperative programming (Stanford classes are 10 weeks long) then different forms of OOP don't matter at all.

Hoisting is weird, but is one of those things that can be worked around by teaching proper patterns and is no more mysterious to new people than whitespace errors in python or the magic word "static" in java or operator overloading in C++ or nightmarish type error messages in haskell.