I agree with everything you said. I am also not convinced that "these online courses are 100% independently viable" especially for the younger kids. I didn't think this a year ago but my opinion has really changed since having the opportunity to teach kids in person in a class. I use online tools in the class and they are awesome but would have lost 90% of the kids if they didn't have someone there to guide/explain things in more detail.

I was also pleasantly surprised how often kids asked "how can I make it do this" which was something outside of what the online tutorial taught. The tutorials were great at sparking their interest but can't really accommodate all of the edge cases especially for those more creative thinkers. I also learned that most of the kids got bored fairly quickly following step-by-step tutorials. They wanted to hack and play around with what they were learning. So I changed the tutorials to be much smaller with very small steps and at the end of each mini tutorial, I encouraged them to hack and try different things based on what they learned.

Maybe with a live online teacher available this would be less of an issue but even with that you lose the personal interaction the kids have with each other and the teacher. Things like showing each other what they created and working directly with the teacher/other kids to expand on that. I think a lot of younger kids really do need that interaction and in-person feedback and I am not sure how that can be re-created online.