Personally I think one advantage of '&&' and '||' is that it's clear they're a notation that you need to know the syntax and semantics of. For instance typically '&&' is "short-circuiting" and will not evaluate its RHS if the LHS is true; a natural-language "if a and b then ..." doesn't suggest that critical detail or necessarily nudge you to go and check. (Not that Dijkstra was in favour of short-circuiting logical operators, to judge by https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/transcriptions/EWD10xx/EWD100... point 4...)
More generally, I'm not sure of the benefit of tailoring the language syntax for beginners rather than experienced practitioners; the advantage of '&&', '||' and the rest of the "C-like" syntax stuff in a new language is that it's familiar to a wide base of existing experienced programmers.