My best guess is, they don’t know better and it‘s the way they learned to make music. Don’t judge them to early, maybe you can teach them some stuff.
Drums are actually the hardest thing to record and the VSTs that are out there are soundwise hard to match. Most of the patches were created by famous producers in famous studios. Do you have a good recording environment, equipment and recording experience?
For a simple first demo, I see nothing wrong in programming drums. For the rest, try to go the real route if you have all the recording stuff.
Of course, if the project starts rolling with gigs and established lineup, there’s no way around recording real drums.