Don't get me wrong, I think that any environment aimed at children needs to be highly visual. One of the most common environments for teaching programming to kids used to be Logo. But it was still 'type commands' => 'produce visuals' and I think there is value in that. A lot of Logo wasn't even producing programs but seeing what crazy affects you could get through one line of "code".

Almost almost all modern programming environments, including JavaScript in the browser, require a lot of work to produce a simple visual.

However, Scratch feels like it does too much and becomes more like solving puzzles rather than creation.