One aspect of Racket that I would expect to appeal to students, but which does not appear in this blog post, is its cross-platform (and widget-native!) GUI framework:

https://docs.racket-lang.org/gui/

The first "side-project" I ever did was a tic-tac-toe program in Java AWT during my first year of programming in high school. AWT wasn't even part of the curriculum, it was just what I gravitated towards as a 13-year-old whose experience with computers consisted entirely of graphical applications.

Maybe the kids these days would be more interested in building a web app or something, but frankly I don't think it's surprising that writing code that primarily consumes and emits text at a terminal is not interesting to students who have never had any need for a terminal before.