" speaking as someone who used to spend hours and hours as a kid in the 1980s in our garage, making prints in our home-made darkroom."
That is why, the grand parent has an emotional attachment to the memories of making prints in their garage, and someone has made a toy which will give someone a "photography like experience" (sort of like an "Easy Bake" Oven gives you a cooking experience) and they cry inside over the cartoon like experience of something that was so transformative in their life. It expresses as hate.
When they put in an escalator on Mt. Everest for the last pitch, when you "run a marathon" in virtual reality, or when you replace all the chemicals in a chemistry set with water. Basically if you take an experience that someone had, and make it accessible by reducing the challenge and/or fidelity you will invoke this reaction on people whose emotional enjoyment of their memories is the challenge or fidelity.
That said, I don't think it will be all that successful. We were quite successful helping folks enjoy analog photography with light sensitive paper and pin hole cameras. Even contact prints of leaves or insects can give you a sense of wonder. This seems like it will be much more expensive than that without much in the way of additional depth so the value proposition is effectively lower.
