I can say it has for me. I spent a couple years on scratch as a kid before moving on to other languages, and it helped me really get into programming.

My hobby projects are almost always video games to this day, partially because of it. I even built my first compiler/interpreter on there before I knew what those words meant, and got exposed to lots of math that I otherwise wouldn't have seen until high school. Being able to easily discover what others were doing, and learn from their projects, helped me out a lot.

It will always be special to me, as I'm sure BASIC and such are to others.