Well, AWS Educate has been updated, and it's very different. So, let's do some diving in.

First, the bad: The mostly broken access to the console is now gone. So, you can't try things like you could before, directly in the console; and you can't spin up or store anything. I'm not sure the rationale here, but it stinks. That said, I'm sure there could have been operational problems with a huge userbase and generic limits. But, I think this should have been solvable.

Next, the decent: It looks like they've revamped the content, and they've lost the hours-long video sessions with industry experts and replaced them with seemingly actual courses. The layout looks simple and the courses are actually in an LMS, as opposed to the loose videos that they had last time.
Now, having used the LMS (it's Canvas) I know there are possibilites that there are hooks for labs that actually allow you to talk to real AWS services/console with guardrails. This isn't as good as the previous (restricted) Console access, but it does allow users the ability to hack on things and get a feeling for how they work in the real world.

I'll have to do a bit more digging to get a true feel, but some things are promising, while other bits got nixed.