If you've discipline and commitment you can make anything work. :)
My 5 year old struggled and needed a whole bunch of support.
my 8 year old was able to work on her own, but still didn't get anywhere near as good learning outcome as being in class.
Now, the reason why my kids didn't fail utterly, was because my wife wasn't working and could, just about support their learning. Until it sapped her will to live.
This is roughly analogous to junior employees. They need special attention, and providing that over remote is a challenge to scale. Not impossible, but a challenge.
You also need to factor in that Junior employees are more likely to have shit accommodation.
EDIT: I definitely should have mentioned that my children are learning from a laptop WITH very close guidance from my wife who is raising them full-time and with intense dedication!
lol Pretty big caveat
In other words, they are not at all just learning from a laptop.
My experience is that unsupervised education is worthless.
I studied CS pre pandemic at a regular university. The whole curriculum was designed around lectures and in-person classes. But I skipped most of them due to social anxiety and laziness. Because every class had a digital script and I could practice with old exams, I did fairly well. Even better than most of those guys that visited every lecture. I guess that part of the problem is that some students tend to think, that just visiting the lecture is enough. They forget to practice the stuff on their own. Which you do automatically if you work through the script all by yourself.
After university I dropped right into my first job. Because of the pandemic it was 100% remote. Again, this worked perfectly. I could not have been any better. I even was able to take additional responsibility due to my performance "which exceeds expectations".
So calling this nonsense is nonesense ;-)
I suspect it works for readers, not audio consumers.