I was at UW around the time they were thinking of introducing this. I recall someone saying they'd found that there was a gap between the students who had computer experience and those that didn't -- the latter could be equally smart but lacking in the dumb stuff like how to operate git and it would end up impacting their ability to learn the profound topics.

I recall that opinions like yours were the opposition to it, but it looks like it ended up happening, and I think it's a good idea. In principle a motivated person with no previous access to computers ought to be able to study computer science as well as someone who grew up with them.

You can learn it yourself, but when I took a similar course, it opened my eyes to knowing which tools were useful for what and how to apply them productively. (I work with people now - software engineers - that basically see any command line fu to be magic that they couldn't possibly understand.)

It's a 1-credit seminar, so you can take it with the more challenging/profound topics