What he's doing is great. But the premise that it'll help kids learn is flawed. People starting off don't need the best tools. Like the author, I started with BASIC. Nowadays, it'd be Python. It needs to be easy, not perfect (god knows BASIC, Pascal, etc have huge flaws). Visual Studio is complete overkill.
In today's computer, I can't see any environment that would do that.
If my kids are presented with Visual Studio, I think they would spend the majority of their time clicking on the thousands of buttons on the ribbon, perhaps.
I'm also not necessarily suggesting that VS Code is the best tool there is. It's just a tool that I know a lot of the community has rallied behind (and which I'm personally a big fan of).
The article is more to suggest that I'd love to see more vendors provide their best work to these devices even if there isn't necessarily a large profit incentive to do so.
I don't really understand why a good editor is necessary in the sense of my old nostalgia or how I would try to streamline the learning/tinkering process today. While I see no specific value in anything in the gap between using whatever debugger/interaction the system offers to futz with the most visible levels and jumping to an online Python/processing/whatever notebook, I suppose starting anywhere that stokes one's curiosity is just as good as anywhere else.
UNIX - any variant - is an absolutely terrible environment for beginner computing. It's inconsistent and incoherent, the security model makes no sense on a single-user machine, there are all kinds of unnecessary gotchas and "No, that doesn't work", the basic editing tools are unfamiliar ("Why doesn't the mouse work in nano?") and the pay off is relatively small. Programming sound, graphics, and animation can be a nightmare, even for professionals.
How about Windows? Worse than UNIX. MacOS? Arguably a better OS, but Xcode is about as friendly as an ill-tempered shark with a hangover.
Which is why I think these "Pi = BBC Micro" projects completely miss the point. The Pi is nothing like a BBC Micro, or a Spectrum, or any other popular 8-bit machine. It's more like a cheap/slow PC clone, and it has none of the immediacy and instant gratification of the original 8-bit scene.
It's the difference between being given a tiny universe you can totally own, and a much bigger universe that's confusing and doesn't seem to have edges.
The latter can be hugely demotivating to many kids who would thrive in the former.
Nowadays, the closest I can think of is the interactive interpreter of python...but it's still not the same. Perhaps because python has orders of magnitude more libraries/functionality/gotchas out of the box. I think I would have been overwhelmed as a young teenager with all of that. Simple(and constrained maybe?) isn't such a bad thing for getting people their first taste.