This is why a lot of programming is taught through graphical games. I'm not knocking Minecraft style programming lessons, they can be very motivational and build up programming skills and thought processes.
Unfortunately, I'm not that kind of programmer. I'm more the type who enjoys scikit-learn and kaggle than xbox. Even as a kid, I was more interested in programming to know who had the advantage in 3v2 rolls in Risk than programming a game itself (in other words, I wanted to program to get insight into a game, not to play the game itself).
But I wanted to introduce my 12 year old to programming, so rather than trying to learn about Minecraft, I helped him install jupyter notebook and showed him how he could automate some of his math homework. We wrote a method to calculate mean, median, range, that sort of thing, and he learned how to feed a series of lists into it, and graph it.
Believe it or not, this pleased him a great deal. He left feeling slightly buoyed, like he'd gained an edge.
But if programming remains an add-on to a school curriculum, who wants to do more math in an after school program, or a summer camp? So "learning to program for kids" will probably remain heavily focused on graphics and games. Which may be ok, my interest in simulating a dice roll rather than programming a game per se may not be reflective of how most kids (who have great potential) are wired.
And honestly, programming Minecraft is among the best of the educational software. Zoombinis was pretty cool, too, even if it was purely a game. Truth his, much educational software just re-teaches math, or history, but with buzzers and rewarding little cartoons for wrong or right answers.