It's so important to realize that just because someone gives it away, doesn't mean it doesn't have a cost. If you use the service and want it to be around, it needs to be supported.
Yeah, the response to adversity is key. Being able to keep going and figuring things out even when you're stuck or out of the realm of your domain knowledge is so important.
The interesting part of this is the "don't pay if you don't get hired" part of the policy. Sure, a couple of the big in-person boot camps have that, but I've never seen it online-only.
I first learned on a variant of BASIC myself when I was in elementary school, and it was effortless then -- but that's a profoundly different thing from learning the professional tools/design patterns/development styles to get hired in a specific domain. As somebody who picked it up again after a long break, the whole point was not 'getting hired in some hot new lucrative industry,' but 'god, please let somebody hire me to do this thing that is so much more mentally satisfying than the last few things I've done for a living.'
From that perspective, I absolutely understand the urgency here, and appreciate how this article talks about how the moment when the tutorials break off is when the real learning begins.
Really good discussion of what falls apart when these "anyone can learn to code!" tutorials leave you high and dry, and how to get past that next huge hurdle of self-sufficiency.