I mostly speak from my own experience growing up (90s). Briefly, this was Apple II in middle school learning BASIC for 6 weeks, Windows 95 in High School, XP in college (Liberal Arts). I didn't start writing code until I was about 25, and was 28 when I started in tech.

I can understand that it's possible kids don't know about paths, since most modern operating systems abstract this from the users, but I wonder if it has as much or more to do with never having been exposed to Linux. That was certainly my situation.

One of the first pieces of advice I read when I started teaching myself to write code was "So you want to be a hacker? Ditch Windows and use Linux full time." I realize there are lots of good Windows programmers out there - not trying to bash anyone - but for the programmer on a budget I think this is the correct path. I will also admit that I haven't used a Linux GUI in many years and I suspect that one could get by without understanding paths using a recent version of Ubuntu. One of the reasons I suspect this is that I have had my parents using Ubuntu since 2011 or so.

Nevertheless, many basic linux concepts were foreign to me when I started using it. Ever since, I've definitely thought Linux computers in schools rather than Windows would be a good idea. Linux computers without a GUI at all might be even better (at least for teaching computer classes), but I guess you might have difficulty holding their attention.