Reading through all the comments, I think there’s also a bit of a generational gap here.

There’s a huge difference between a kid turning on a Commodore 64 or an Apple II and being dropped into the relatively no-frills versions the BASIC interpreter versus a kid in the early ’90s who had a DOS machine with MS-DOS 5 bundled with QBasic which IMHO is a more representative example of a “batteries included” BASIC environment that was significantly more user-friendly.

I also encountered QBASIC as an elementary school kid - it felt like the closest thing to sorcery. People who grew up in the age of the internet really underestimate how awesome it was to be able to just be able to place the cursor on a more obscure command (like PEEK/POKE or POINT) and see something like this:

  Returns the current graphics cursor coordinates or the color attribute of a specified pixel.

  'This example requires a color graphics adapter.
  SCREEN 1
  LINE (0, 0)-(100, 100), 2
  LOCATE 14, 1
  FOR y% = 1 TO 10
      FOR x% = 1 TO 10
          PRINT POINT(x%, y%);
      NEXT x%
      PRINT
  NEXT y%