I love PICO-8 too. There are so many games, and they’re all free to play, with the source code available to explore or modify. Games are also reltively easily published online. Some PICO-8 games are genuine works of art. I’m always impressed by how creative people become when working within tight constraints. I wish I’d had something like this when I was a kid.
I always recommend Pico-8 to like minded folks, sometimes kids.
I used to volunteer at a program in my local library that was designed to get kids into tech. They wanted someone to teach programming.
I bought like ten Pico-8 licenses for it [1], and used that to teach some simple programming. I figured that a simple platform like Pico-8 is still "real" programming, but you can go from "zero to viewable product" very quickly, which would be more fun for the kids; certainly less frustrating than trying to teach about vertex shaders and Vulkan.
Sadly none of the kids really took to it, but that's probably more of a criticism of how I was teaching than any issues with Pico-8.
[1] It wasn't actually my money. My employer at the time was willing to reimburse me
