I'd would say that while the technology can be an initial barrier to entry, but I know from doing training that you can get people over that hurdle with the VE (some people never reach competency using source editing). However, once the basic technology skill is acquired, the next thing that happens to a new user is that they fall foul of one of our many policies including the Manual of Style, encounter an "owner'/"gatekeeper" who implements their own" I-don't-like-it " policy, or any of the zillion rules of the encyclopedia whose 5th pillar is "no firm rules" (talk about misleading advertiing!). Their edit gets reverted, the explanation is often done by a tool (like Twinkle) so is quite non-specific, or if hand-written contains mention of (or links to) one of our vast army of policies which are probably not written with the new user as the target readership. The new user really needs more specific and more explanatory help.
Now, as someone who is diligent with my watchlist, I feel this tension myself in dealing with problematic but probably good faith edits by new users. I do try to help by being more fullsome in my explanation of the revert or by trying to modify their edit to make it conformant, but sometimes I just don't have the time to do that due to other demands on me from either other Wikimedia activities or the demands of real life. The other constraint on doing a better job of helping newbies is technological. When I am away from home, I usually am on a mobile device from which I can process my watchlist, but the only actions I can easily take are the click-the-button actions like "revert, tick box for reason" or "thanks" or "welcome". I don't have the ability to edit on a mobile device which providing good assistance to a newbie requires. When real life causes me to be away from home for days or weeks on end, I just have to do revert the more problematic edits and move on. So even as someone who tries to reach out and help new people, I just can't always do what I think needs to be done, and of course a lot of people just don't even try to help in the first place. Many editors will revert an edit without explanation or if they do write something on the User Talk page (with a tool or manually), many don't appear to watch that page for a reply. So a combination of our strict rules and abrasive culture loses us a lot of new contributors at this point
I think the revert of a new contributor needs to be drawn to the attention of someone other than the reverting editor as this is obviously a point at which we are likely to lose the new contributor if they are not helped over this hurdle. (I am not referring here to outright vandalism but anything that appears may be good faith). Having observed new contributors in training and events, I know they do not always notice notifications/messages from the tool bar; their attention is very focussed on the article text area of the screen. So, if they make an edit, it's get very quickly reverted, they often don't realise what has happened. What happens is that they don't see their change in their article and so they assume that they didn't make their change correctly (from a technological perspective) so go back into edit mode and repeat their edit (or a minor variation of it) and save it again. And they will do it again and again, and they are quickly at 3RR without even realising anyone was objecting to their edit. Of course the reverting editors don't see the situation like that, they see the persistent repetition of an edit that has been explained is unacceptable one, twice or thrice as defiance and are happy to see them blocked. New user behaviour is easily misinterpreted because most people never get to observe new users in real life to see how they misunderstand/misinterpret the whole experience.