[ehnto]

To be fair, CSS is nothing like programming. So she wasn't really learning react, she was learning the entire paradigm of programming in the context of react. My guess is that would have been way harder than learning programming in a traditional language and then learning React, because you wouldn't have been able to separate the concepts that are React specific from the concepts that are just programming. It would have been harder to answer the "why do we do it this way" questions, which can be really important to developing an intuitive underatanding of programming.

I would like to add as well, as a career move, total slam dunk.