> Even CS students start with pretty high level of abstraction, very few start from x86 asm instructions.

> We need to make them implement ALU's on logical gates and wires

Things must have certainly changed since I was a CS student :-/ We did an assembler course in second year, and implemented a basic adder in circuitry in a different course.

This was in the mid-90s, when there was definitely little need for assembly programmers outside of EE (I was CS).