Don't think any of the same people are involved but the similarities are striking, and I'm somewhat heartened to see there's still a market for these kinds of programming environments. They're certainly great for teaching and getting kids interested in computing because of the almost instant results you can achieve.
I'm also a big fan of open source, but it sounds like the license cost here was negligible and the important part is that the kids learn the concepts. They can always take that knowledge home and program in whatever tools they want.
The point with these is that everything you need is in the box: no complex toolchain to set up, no fussing with libraries, no fighting to get different bits of technology to work together. Just type in your code, hit run and (assuming you haven't made any errors) it simply works.
Yes, these tools might not be the most robust ever, or suitable for all problems, but they do allow you to get up and running very quickly, with the minimum of boilerplate and ceremony. If what you mainly want to do is get people into computers by making objects fly around the screen and blow up, they're absolutely perfect.
You should still be able to do this via a modern 2D engine like Godot. It comes with its built-in scripting solution that's rather Python like, but you don't have to use that; native bindings are available, and easily accessed from, e.g. C++ or Rust.
I know some kids could maybe make it work, but those are tough languages with a lot of complications and no garbage collector to help out. Manual memory management would just be yet another roadblock.
Again, I think the complex industry solutions are more harmful here. These kids don't need to make Call of Duty 3. They are more at the Pong skill level. A tool that is far simpler and far less featureful is superior here.
When they get older and need to use Unity or Unreal or whatever, they can switch without having lost much.