What about the kids in school districts that issue locked-down Chromebooks? They probably can't even do that!

I, for one, learned how to bcdedit my way into booting from a .vhd on my school-issued laptop. And how to SSH tunnel on port 443 to get past the proxy. How LSPs worked on Windows. Messing around is how kids get their start in computers, and I couldn't agree with the parent comment more.

Or average Joe Teenager installs a Linux distribution, which then provides bash, perl, awk, Python, C, C++, often Tcl/Tk, etc. and usually includes one or more editors for creating source files. All without "pull[ing] in hundreds of NPM dependencies from shady places"