I'm no expert on education, but having been a TA and helped out a few people since, I repeatedly see text getting in the way of everything else.

Beginners often find both the things you are saying some what hard.

First, note that there is reading vs editing. Perhaps in grade school people learn to parse large expressions (though I find that people generally are not prepared well, because grade school expressions are too small). But editing code and keeping track of what changes you made --- essential to debug your first programs --- is much more new to people who are used to just rewriting a few short algebra expresions with pencils. It's then, when the beginner is most mentally taxed, that the syntax errors creep in --- and further interrupt their thinking process.

Hopefully we can agree the second challenge is completely fundamental to the field, while the first however is just an artifact of the way things are implemented today. Well, based on the above scenario and others I repeated see the cognitive burden of the first interrupting the second, and so student waste effort and loose focus over "easy stupid text syntax", and therefore long delay mastery of trees, term rewriting and substitution in particular, etc.

To be clear, I am no education expert either and it was my personal opinion. Maybe I have been around the people naturally good at math, and everyone found scratch clumsy and irritating than python. Python was pretty natural for them.