My snarky answer to that is that I genuinely think any software engineer should be able to read and write assembly, even if purely to remind them just how far up the stack we usually operate at.

If we take "this" to mean low-level programming, it can open doors into anywhere from reverse engineering, to OS development etc (or more boringly, writing toolchains). Some parts of compilers rely heavily on having real problem solving skills at this level - for example most books won't teach you how to integrate ELF into your compiler, let alone DWARF.

I am hesitant to say performance optimization because many people have an idea of a CPU just executing one instruction at a time rather than the heavily pipelined and out of order monsters we have today.

To become Anger Fog, you must first invent the CPU-niverse.

(Agner is a almost mythical figure for many compiler and microarchitecture folks)