The lab course is getting harder to run since the parts in the BOM on the author website are being end-of-life'd. I ran into this when I started trying to run it as a self-study project a while ago. It wasn't always clear what parts you could use to replace them either...

Also, the BOM itself doesn't have everything used in the course, so I sometimes found I needed to order something I hadn't anticipated needing. (the frustration with this ultimately caused me to drop it, maybe half-ish of the way through)

This doesn't really negate your point, the lab course certainly still exists, I'm just not sure how amenable it is to run through as a self-study hobbyist.