I consider it a "learning to walk before running" type of thing. It may not be interesting to a lot of beginners, many of which probably want to immediately start doing something "interesting", but these are the fundamental basics that anyone claiming to have a CS degree should know.
Starting with higher-level languages tends to breed more misconceptions, because the students get used to seeing things "seem to work like this", and having only a vague, superficial understanding, it is much harder to unlearn these than to learn the truth in the beginning.
It's also not as if things like logic, data representation, and the sequential nature of programs don't matter at higher levels --- whenever one uses conditional statements and loops, a good grasp of boolean logic is essential. Why numbers have a finite range, floating point values aren't exact, etc. all depend on knowing how data is represented. Not knowing these things will at best make it difficult to reason about code, and increase the chance of introducing bugs; at worst, it can lead to security flaws.
Starting with higher-level languages tends to breed more misconceptions, because the students get used to seeing things "seem to work like this", and having only a vague, superficial understanding, it is much harder to unlearn these than to learn the truth in the beginning.
It's also not as if things like logic, data representation, and the sequential nature of programs don't matter at higher levels --- whenever one uses conditional statements and loops, a good grasp of boolean logic is essential. Why numbers have a finite range, floating point values aren't exact, etc. all depend on knowing how data is represented. Not knowing these things will at best make it difficult to reason about code, and increase the chance of introducing bugs; at worst, it can lead to security flaws.