> It's ridiculous to expect newcomers to a language and/or programming in general to slog through a 20 or 30-step environment setup process

Modern IDEs often require an hour long install, and then you turn them on and are faced with 10,000 buttons and 50 windows, they aren't simple either.

I have had good success with making beginners people sit through a 30 minute dev environment set up process, in video form. No complaints, everyone got it working, on linux, mac, and windows. I used VS Code + the Go language plugin. Once set up, you have a pretty simple IDE-like environment.

I do miss the days when every dos PC just shipped with QBasic, or when you could get a simple, quick loading IDE like TurboC++