No child learned anything useful in Minecraft.

It's better than Candy Crush (no overt addicting psychological tricks) but ultimately the same kind of waste of time.

No child ever grew up and said "gee, how great it is that I spent 10000 hours in Minecraft instead of doing sports or learning a useful skill".

I grew up on video games myself; trust me, it sucks.

I grew up playing video games, and now I'm a graphics programmer. I learned to program because I wanted to make games. Trust me, it slaps.

Some years ago I worked at a technology-oriented summer camp where I personally taught several bright young children to program. Minecraft mods were an incredibly popular project and a big driver of interest for many of the kids. Many of my counselor colleagues got into programming themselves modding Warcraft III and other games of that era. The absolute conversion rate may be low because the playerbase is so huge, but I think something like Minecraft is definitely the first (or zero-th) step in the journey of a lot of kids these days who become interested in technology and will later develop into the next generation of programmers & technologists.