Strongly (well, moderately) disagree, but not necessarily because I think the Scratch language is well designed.
My nieces both started out in Scratch, and I don't know what they liked about it, but they bounced off everything else I had been trying to show them. It might have been the community aspect (I strongly suspect this had something to do with it), it might have been that Scratch is so limited that it stops being intimidating. I feel like there is a culturally taught fear of text editors among modern kids; my nieces are around really supportive people who think they're smart and encourage them, and I still think they still feel this sense that text editors are not designed for them? Could be my imagination.
I don't know what to think about it because I don't really 100% know why they (or anyone) likes Scratch. I can not stand Scratch, everything is way too hard to do, it lacks so many basic features that you have to approach every problem through the lens of some completely alien architecture where you're doing meta-programming to get basic stuff like dynamically allocated objects. This is a tool that is so limited in so many weird ways that it makes programming way harder than it should be. Everything about it from the UI to how it's structured to the performance: for me, it just makes programming into a chore.
But I can't deny that there's something there that makes it more accessible than other platforms -- and watching my nieces get into it was a big lesson to me in the limitations of saying, "but they're smart and understand the concepts of iteration and variables, why can't they just write Javascript?" They could, they're smart enough to do that, but Scratch resonates with them and Javascript doesn't.
I sympathize with the author's point of view (part of the reason I can't get into programming games is that everything enjoyable from them I can also get... programming). But there is something to these platforms like Scratch, Pico8, etc, that undeniably hits some people in a way that a traditional language doesn't, and whether or not Lisp/JS/C could capture kids the same way, something about them or the ecosystems around them is not measuring up for some kids. Some other kids are the opposite, probably. I got into programming with Flash/TI-83 Basic; I'm not sure where they on that spectrum between toy and tool they fall.