I think you are significantly overestimating how much knowledge is necessary to do these things. This course does not claim to prepare you to be able to work anywhere near the current level of technology, it claims to teach you enough to construct a Tetris game starting from NAND gates. I can assure you, that Attanasof (inventor of the electronic digital computer) would have killed to have a resource like this.
To go with your specific example of compilers. Why would people need to learn enough to be able to conrtibute to GCC to get anything out of this course. GCC is the leading open-source compiler; knowing enough to contribute is overkill.
To give an example from personal experience, I, over the course of a weakened, wrote my own operating system from scratch, without having had any formal training in Systems design. I have no doubt that my system would collapse under the weight of doing anything remotely close to what we would expect a modern system to be able to do. The only reason I was willing to risk running it on bare metal was that I had an old, semi-broken, laptop that I didn't care about. But I still learned a lot from the process.
In terms of including it in an comp. eng. program, it seems like it would fit in well as a 101 course. It provides a big picture of how everything fits together, and a first look at all of the topics will help enough when you go to learn them in depth that it seems like it could be worth the time investment.
To go with your specific example of compilers. Why would people need to learn enough to be able to conrtibute to GCC to get anything out of this course. GCC is the leading open-source compiler; knowing enough to contribute is overkill.
To give an example from personal experience, I, over the course of a weakened, wrote my own operating system from scratch, without having had any formal training in Systems design. I have no doubt that my system would collapse under the weight of doing anything remotely close to what we would expect a modern system to be able to do. The only reason I was willing to risk running it on bare metal was that I had an old, semi-broken, laptop that I didn't care about. But I still learned a lot from the process.
In terms of including it in an comp. eng. program, it seems like it would fit in well as a 101 course. It provides a big picture of how everything fits together, and a first look at all of the topics will help enough when you go to learn them in depth that it seems like it could be worth the time investment.