I think I agree but it is very important that the student learns which facts they were taught are about ARM/ARM64/MIPS (or whatever you choose to use) and which

I think I agree but it is very important that the student learns which facts they were taught are about ARM/ARM64/MIPS (or whatever you choose to use) and which are about computers in general. Otherwise, you get people coming to stack overflow with questions like "How come this book says that on x86 you can jump into the middle of an instruction and execute those bytes as a different instruction, when clearly this is impossible, because I have studied RISC-based computer in a COA class and thought that instructions are read sequentially and that instructions memory are read from memory 4 bytes at a time".