I think your stance is needlessly puritan. At some point, the program has to actually do something and put it on the screen. Whether that is printing lines of text or moving a colorful sprite in some way is really not that different, except one is a lot more appealing to a young learner.
Beyond that it's pretty similar to the thing I (and you) recommend.
The problem is not syntax, the problem is that they're bad at typing on a keyboard.
I suspect it's mostly because the keyboard is too big and stiff...
As sibling comment indicates, it's also good to be able to code on a tablet, but I didn't think that would be as convincing to parent who seems opposed to graphical interfaces in general.
1. Prevent syntax errors.
2. Remove the need to type on a keyboard.
3. Remove the need to memorize basic commands.
The kids will eventually need to learn #2, but I think it's great that they can do programming in the interim.
#3 will start to come naturally once you've dragged enough if-else blocks in Scratch. Scratch is an on-ramp.
I will point out btw that Scratch is turing-complete.
You could build a "little graphical puzzle pieces" tool for any AST. You could even enable it to be driven with any combination of keypress input and mouse- or touch-based drag and drop. (Or even expose a text-based dump, for "free-form" editing by advanced users.)