Learning to program it's like learning to speak a new language. And learning a new language is boring when all you can do is completing some monotonous exercises with no evident real life use.
It's 2022, computers have become way bigger and complex since 1980, and "look this device can prompt for a number in the terminal and multiply it!" Does not excite everyone anymore.
Also, the distance from "hello world" to "use your coding skills creatively" is really high, and a lot of people just bail before they get to that goal.
We should play more with integrated circuits, where a few lines in C, Go or Rust can generate something tangible, ann slowly raise the level to effective modern code.
Humans learn through experience, with actions and with the expectation of some feedback with results. Solving a buttloads of mindless exercises that have no distinctive purpose is not a good way of learning