I'm still looking for the 2025-2030 version of a kid's first computer. C64 and Apple ][ made sense back then because whatever the poor animation they provided back in the late 70s/early 80s are exciting ENOUGH for younger version of us. Back then ANY interaction is good enough. NES was the bang but it definitely requires a lot of imagination to match the sprites to the box arts. I think the key here is to force the kids to use imagination.

Actually I'm going to do an experiment on my soon to be 5-years-old son. I have exposed some cartoon shows to him, but none of them is very fancy. I gave him Curious George and Bluey, both fall more into the hand-drawn camp than the CG camp. I have never expose him to any games or mobile apps like TikTok. I'm going to expose NES games or C64 games to him and see if he is interested. Despite my respect to John Carmack, I'm always in the camp of "you don't need post-2000 graphics to make any genre interesting, even for FPS", and I always believe the advancement of graphics hurts games more than benefiting them.