I used to spend a lot of time thinking about this while helping build software & TA'ing for Berkeley's introductory course (which uses Python & Scheme) and I largely agree with the author. If you're wondering why the author ignores large schools, it's because they have the resources to invest in this. Here's a sample of the things the efforts that Berkeley did for their introductory course [1]

* Online tools to run & visualize code execution directly from the online textbook (ex: https://composingprograms.com/pages/16-higher-order-function...) * Easy submission for students (no git in CS1, no scp, no printing) * Instructor autograding for all assignments so the course staff could focus on reviewing code for style/other components. * Automatically backing up student code * In some assignments, there were automated hints for syntax, styling, and even correctness [2, 3] * Online collaborative editing for partner assignments [4] * Full time staff allocated to building teaching infrastructure to "reduce accidental complexities when using code to solve problems" * Completely hosted environments (via Jupyter Notebooks or Scratch) for courses with a lot of non-majors.

[1] https://cs61a.org [2] https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3059009.3059058 [3] https://okpy.org/about/publications/ [4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=polTBnMXGQI&rel=0