I agree. I used to be a huge fan of Repl, but the limitations start to present themselves pretty early on. My advice is still the same for people who want to code: go on Ebay and buy a used Thinkpad, install Linux on it and write code. By step two, most people can self-educate themselves on where to go next.
Funny that is your suggestion, I started (serious) programming by ordering a $200 laptop from Amazon and installing Linux on it. THIS is the exact advice I give to people. It gives me chills how you captured my path to software so succinctly.
Step two is extremely underrated. There's always been a family computer in my home, but I couldn't do whatever I wanted on it.
My irremediable descent into nerddom started when I got a cheap netbook. It was an awful machine, but I could freely poke around and learn stuff.
If you're just starting, a potato computer that you fully, exclusively own is much better than a great machine that you share with other people.
But of course it's a big time investment and not everyone is interested. If you just want to learn the basics of programming, a fully managed environment is also fine. So much is being abstracted by the programming language itself that the underlying stack is almost a detail.