Q. Is this really as harmful as you think?
A. Go to your parents house, your grandparents house etc and look at their Windows PC, look at the installed software in the past year, and try to use the device. Run some antivirus scans. There’s no way this implementation doesn’t end in tears — there’s a reason there’s a trillion dollar security industry, and that most problems revolve around malware and endpoints.
We recently went through a nuke-n-pave on my kids desktops. I plugged in an external drive for them to do backups, and we walked through the process. This was in Fedora with pretty much default Gnome tools. They came away understanding the process and how to track it, but I think they still don’t really understand file organization.
These kids grew up with tablets and smartphones where they don’t even see the file system, so I’m not shocked.