It's a pretty icky thing to say, to be sure. This person set a new world record and she's receiving comments about her appearance? This woman performed an incredible feat of skill and she's being reduced to her looks. Doesn't sound like much of a compliment when you frame it like that, does it? Sounds like sexism to me.
Web development in the 90s and early 00s was not a practical substitute for learning how to program. Now, it is.
You make a claim that the low-level nature of the calculator programming was an enticement to you. That may be, but I would hestitate to generalize based on your own experiences. I would suspect that the ability to come up with something that actually does something conventionally interesting trumps the benefits of working close to the metal, ESPECIALLY with young, novice programmers. A few hours of hacking in assembler and you may get to hello world, whereas the same amount of effort in javascript might net you the ability to drag and drop objects around a UI. Which is more impressive to a kid?
Oh, it completely does. My niece this year is required to have a laptop for school. She has to have a PC with her. Now, she has no interest or aptitude for programming, but if any of her classmates do, they can easily fire up a web browser and get to hacking, even without an Internet connection.
Is a graphing calculator really the most obvious way that a young and impressionable mind will find an inroads to programming in this day and age? I find that idea laughable. Tinkering on the web is the obvious modern-day equivalent that is completely neglected when talking about how hostile the modern environment is towards the young creative spirit.
Everyone I know who's left facebook - EVERYONE I know who's left facebook - has come crawling back. In most cases it's because they're tired of being left in the dark about events. So as to whether or not it leaves "holes in your life", I guess that depends how you feel about sitting alone at home while your friends are out skiing, watching movies, or catching a show.
"being more familiar with Scala than Java" is a few miles east from "cannot/will not write pseudocode comprehensible to people who don't grok functional languages".