It really depends where you go. In undergrad, my first intro CS course was basically working through the Intel x86 manuals[0].

Partway through, I transferred to another state, and their college's intro course was about C.

0: https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/developer/articles/t...

Not really — where are the NANDs and machine code?

In my experience, sometimes the "systems" part means something along the lines of "architecture". I've seen syllabi for "computer systems" courses that did an overview of virtual memory and all, ran up to a bit of assembly, and then moved on to stuff the OS provides like syscalls, etc. Maybe that's the case here?

I got curious and looked. It's not intro to computer science, but intro to computer systems (i.e. systems programming and high level computer architecture). https://cs.brown.edu/courses/info/csci0330/

Back on my high school days at technical school, Assembly programming was taught on the 11th grade, alongside Turbo Pascal, Clipper and DBase III+, to give an image of the time period.

15 year old students had no issue dealing with 8086 and 68000 Assembly.