I taught a course on Javascript in undergrad with a unit on react as well as redux (cis.upenn.edu/~cis197, check it out!). To this day, I still think people learning JS should know about redux because of the design pattern it encourages (note that when people are first learning CS, this is probably the first-ish time they're coming across the concept of a reducer and "functional" state that isn't mutated directly).

I think it's even more important for people self-learning react to be exposed to redux in some way; yeah, there's boilerplate, but it's just beautiful when all put together and isn't a Blackbox (I love dan's tutorial on egghead explaining redux from the ground up precisely because it breaks down exactly what's working and why it is).

This blog post does an excellent job of convincing newcomers in the JS world to consider learning redux. I'm definitely forwarding this to the current instructor of the course!