The cynic in me sees these approaches as a corporate-friendly way to be able to hire more "juniors" to save money. Entire frameworks and languages seemingly exist to enable low barrier entry to junior developers without any effort of the corporate to invest in these junior developers. There needs to be a balance between the need for junior developers to be productive and restricting technology just so as many as possible junior developers can be productive at low cost for the corporate. With stuff like React Native and Electron, I feel the former takes the lead at the expense of technology.

Agree that simplistic languages could work well in academia, as the first language that students see. I studied C as my first language, and I am not sure that is optimal. Nor do I think Java is that language, as many study that first, these days.