It might feel limited for students with prior programming experience. However, my first programming course (in high-school) used BSL & co, taught from “How To Design Prgrams” (1), and it didn’t feel restrictive. Having to manually recurse, construct lists, &c. made clear exactly what later abstractions and syntactic sugar did. Rather than feeling that my hands had been tied before being introduced to, for example, higher order function, I felt I’d been granted superpowers once i had: nearly every function we’d previously struggled to write could now be written in one or two lines, and we even understood fully what those lines meant! Admittedly, this excitement was that of an absolute beginner.
Economic interest, fear (for a threatened ideology), and anger as motives for your aptly labeled "political vandalism" don't seem mutually exclusive. Further more I don't think the author was as naive as you think, as he posits that disruption of traditional state vs federal power distributions economic inequity, and ideological claustrophobia, all contribute to a seemingly nation-wide impulse to endorse the political "wrecking ball", i.e., Donald Trump.
Despite my indoctrination by extreme leftists and irreparably biased current frame of mind (my political views must complement or evolve antithetic to those touted by my parents -- they consist in reaction), the above entreaty for moderation -- for bipartisan, and inter-class sympathy; for an unified effort towards ideological coalescence, or minimally, tolerance -- evokes within me a hitherto repressed indignance, a righteous (and likely apprentice) fury with apparently ubiquitous moral complacence. Our bigotry, borne and exacerbated by exploitative class-stratification turns inwards as shame and anger or outwards--but never with avail towards the those of power--towards equally resentful fellow exploitees. Cornered masses consume themselves in a continuous holocaust of hate, directed at anything and everything but that and those responsible. Such recursive self-sabotage of entire stratospheres isn't novel or even worthy of yet hackneyed indictment. My articulation of anguish illuminates a more recent, poorly noted, dimension of social dysfunction: formerly explicit, oligarchical, tyrannical rule -- that sovereignty -- now condescends subjects with a dissemblance of justice, civil rights, autonomy and benevolent patronage. Dissonance of promise and action ignites further ignorant prejudice. Little frustrates more than inconsistency and contradiction, except for when such absurdity enumerates and bounds the extent and nature of our 'how's and 'why's and 'what's -- that is, when an authoritarian farce further impedes the autonomy of its subjects. As so eloquently stated in the above essay, a mutual effort of moderation and intra/inter-class sympathy may save us yet.
Edit: apologies for such pretentious language. Hemingway would cuss me out and die of apoplexy. I rationalize my fascination with words as a futile, but crucial battle against Zipfs law as it describes the distribution and frequency of vocabulary within the general populace.
(1) https://docs.racket-lang.org/htdp-langs/index.html