It is the language itself, that prevents it from being suitable to be a first language.
The culture, the people and the community as such, is very noob friendly.
Mostly, yes. One part that really seems underdeveloped, is support for literate programming.
So that we can use not instead of ! and so on.
Literate programming is a great start to programming, since most of us are already literate.
We already know how to use and, or, not and so on.
We don’t need to learn those, and code reads more natural to those, who are not used to random symbols, such as || and mathematical symbols.
I posted on other things in the past.
And others have made great suggestions as well:
Another aspect would be to care a bit about the VS Code Jupyter extension compatibility, as this serves as a great platform for tutorials.
And overall, I think it is more about the mindset, and the intention of the community.
I am sure, all these things can improve, but I am not so sure, that the community actually desires Julia to be a language for new programmers.
With that mindset, the rest would come naturally, I assume.