Low-Rez pixel art is the great equalizer.

Anyone can do low-rez pixel art and make it look at least decent.

There was a high school teacher that taught his students how to code homebrew games on the Game Boy Advance via emulators and a flash cart.

While this teachers deserves applause, ultimately all the student projects looked amateurish next to commercial Game Boy Advance games.

The fuze basic for the Nintendo Switch also appeals to students but it relies on a pre-packaged library of professional 3d assets. Simply reusing professional assets leads to a mish-mash of styles. Your own artwork next to these assets also looks unflattering.

The low rez resolution and reduced color palette of pico-8 makes for more visual consistency. Yes professional pixel artists will still produce better looking games but the beginners art does not look like crap in comparison either.
You can still be a one-man shop like in the days of bedroom coding in the UK of the eighties. Instead of being at least a artist/coder duo.

Experience all game genres in bite-sized chunks.

As today's big games are too time-consuming for many of us in the later stages of adulthood, PICO-8 games take 30 minutes to 2 hours to complete and can always be finished in one evening. What's more, they are so focused because of the size restrictions there is never any filler. Most of them are pure joy. Not a drag, not a grind.

Timeless.

The pico-8 community is vibrant. There are many passing trends, but pico-8 has been around for 6 years now.
In a sense retro computing is timeless because if I read an issue of retro gamer from 2012 it features the same stories it does today. Once old, those simple games don't really get any older. They become classics. And so PICO-8 is timeless too.

PICO-8 vs vintage computing.

Some prefer to work with real hardware constraints and code for the C64, the Game Boy, the NES. But if most players run those games inside emulators anyway what's the point? PICO-8 also has arbitrary constraints, but they are more fun.

Maybe, my friend uses Pico-8 but has not used it in college... but he's in a computer class... so... idk

Simple I've learned here and I'm already comfortable with the interface, but you already independently have to decide what would suit you better. Besides, I prefer to use this source https://paperap.com/free-papers/sir-gawain-and-the-green-knight/ together with this one, because here I find a lot of ideas that help me with my college projects. More specifically I am intrigued by the fact that there are writings here like Sir Gawain And The Green Knight, this one I find very nice.