Interestingly, my engineering school adopted the opposite approach on practical teaching: the first couple of month after the preparatory years were all about r

Interestingly, my engineering school adopted the opposite approach on practical teaching: the first couple of month after the preparatory years were all about re-building all the C stdlib, networking layer, then building your own shell, then building your own assembler and corresponding vm (it was an assembler for a quartet based system for whatever reason), then compiler for a random language in c++ (tiger) and so forth. We also built a simple CPU from gates using an electronic simulator. Left me with some confidence that I could do things with a relative confidence. Definitely value in learning the basics.