I don't think it's comparable to teaching arithmetic from a highly theoretical basis, since the type of low-level beginnings I'm advocating for are starting from a concrete foundation --- logic gates from relays and such, not unlike the approach used by Petzold's book Code.

Incidentally, that book has been praised for making computation easy to understand for non-programmers, which I would consider to be evidence for starting out low-level.

but times have changed

Not for the better, if you look at the average state of software today --- and I think a lot of it can be explained by the general lack of low-level knowledge.