If someone wants to get into robotics as a hobby for the first time, and the #1 thing you tell them is "start with learning ROS", one questions whether you are trying to help them or sabotage them.
For this question specifically: there are many ways to approach robotics, incl. from the hardware side. But approaching it from the software (sim) side is not invalid, so I don't think down-voting my comment was warranted.