I've used Thonny to teach programming to complete beginners with good results.
Most people love it and are loathe to switch to VS Code to PyCharm later on in the course.
What really works nicely for teaching is that after code is run from .py fle, session stays interactive and you can use commands from REPL and see variable values, types, ids.
Really helpful when starting out.
When switching to VS Code, students are confused why debugger is not "live" after code is run.
Some tiny pain points with Thonny:
I do wish a few keybindings were more "usual"
For example un/comment is Ctrl(Cmd)-3 . It makes sense for Python, but Ctrl-/ is pretty much standard everywhere else.
Also pop up help for functions and classes and tab completion does not work too well (at least on versions under 4).
Thonny has a nice built in interface to pip. Unfortunately it used to conflict with Anaconda installations.
Had a case 2 years ago when half the class had problems with packages because Thonny was installed ahead of Anaconda.
Maybe those issues are fixed now in the latest version.