We do receive light from the first generation of stars (and studying this light helps us understand early periods of the universe, and is a big motivation for the James Webb Space Telescope), but to actually distinguish individual stars from that far back is a very difficult problem. Let's see what "sufficiently powerful" would actually be for that task:
It is possible to distinguish individual stars in M31 (~2.5 million LY away) with a half-meter telescope (maybe even a bit smaller for the blue giants) under good observing conditions. A half meter telescope has a diffraction-limited resolution of about 1 parsec at that distance, and a limiting magnitude of about +17. With a bigger telescope (like Hubble: 2.4m diameter),
the stars really stand out.
Now consider resolving stars in a galaxy a thousand times farther away (~2.5 billion light years distant). Then to achieve the necessary resolution and limiting magnitude, the telescope's size must be at least
500 meters! Such a large telescope diameter is of course completely implausible, and the scope would also need to be either in space, or use adaptive optics if on the ground.
We could also achieve this resolution with interferometry, but not the limiting magnitude (since that is also dependent on the individual telescope diameter and the atmospheric seeing.)
Finally, consider the first generation of stars, when they first formed. Let's take this to be when the universe was 500 million years old (we actually think stars began even earlier than that, but let's be generous).
For such a great look-back time, we must account for cosmic expansion. The universe at 500 million years of age corresponds to a co-moving distance of almost 10Gpc (~32Gly), or a redshift of z=10. This means the light is redshifted by a factor of z+1=11, so the wavelength we see is 11 times longer than what was emitted. That puts most of the star's spectrum in the infrared. (This is also why JWST focuses in the infrared instead of the optical spectrum.)
The expansion also affects the image's apparent size and luminosity. Fortunately, that actually ends up helping us! Beyond a lookback time of about 10 billion years (z~1.7), images actually look
bigger with increasing distance. At z=10, the image scale is 4.2kpc per arcsecond on the sky, which is comparable to how big something would look 3 billion light years away if space was not expanding. But 3 billion light years is still very far away, and as we saw above, requires a stupidly big telescope to actually resolve individual stars. So even though the expansion helps us, it doesn't help us nearly enough. Having to look in the infrared also hinders us, since our resolution isn't as good at longer wavelengths.
So with JWST, we won't literally see the first stars, but we will see the first galaxies, and analyze their spectra in much greater detail than ever before. This will teach us a lot about what the first population of stars was like, how and when they formed, and the interplay between star and galaxy formation. Should be really fascinating.