I think he meant that Pico-8 is so stripped down you have to spend a lot time writing lower level game engine stuff before you get to the fun, moving things around, stuff. Not boilerplate in that you are repeating code within your Pico-8 game, but that you have to rewrite basic functions that come built in to typical game frameworks.
Exactly. And it's not that PICO-8 is bad for it; in fact PICO-8 is marvelously flexible since it imposes so little on you in terms of structure, so the games are a lot more variable than, say, something like rpgmaker, where the results can end up feeling a bit samey (until you have something really exceptional on the art and writing side, like Rakuen).
But yeah, as far an introductory programming platform, it's much better of think of PICO-8 as an upgrade from QBasic than an upgrade from ZZT.
