I think they rarely escape doing this hand-holding unless they're actually willing to flunk out students en masse. Maybe MIT is; the University of Iowa certainly wasn't. So they end up just in a state of denial in which they say they're teaching all this great theoretical material but they're doing a half-assed job of teaching either body of knowledge.
I also don't think this knowledge gets outdated that quickly. I'd say if they'd put together a topic list like this for 2006, more than half the specific tools would still be useful, and the concepts from the rest would still transfer over pretty well to what people use today. For example, yeah, we didn't have VS Code and LSP back then, but IDEs didn't look that different. We didn't (quite) have tmux but used screen for the same purpose. etc. Some things are arguably new (devcontainers have evolved well beyond setting up a chroot jail, AI tools are new) but it's mostly additive. If you stay away from the most bleeding-edge stuff (I'm not sure the "AI for the shell (Warp, Zummoner)" is wise to spend much time on) you never have to throw much out.
There certainly are fits and starts in the industry. I'm not sure the past 5 years or so looks THAT different from today. (Leaving aside LLMs.)
From my peripheral knowledge, MIT does try to hand-hold to some degree. Isn't the look-left and look-right, one of those people won't be here next year sort of places. But, certainly, people do get in over their head at some places. I tutored/TAd in (business) grad school and some people just didn't have the basics. I couldn't do remedial high school arithmetic from the ground up--especially for some people who weren't even willing to try seriously.
the same MIT that doesn't give out grades in the first year? (just Pass / NoPass)
the high achievers who scored solid grades to get there literally kill themselves when they pull Cs and Ds, even though it's a hard class and is sort of "look left, look right"
Yes, poor grades were often a shock to people accustomed to being straight A students in high school. Though most made it through or ended up, in some cases, going elsewhere.
I could see it being obsolete quickly to the extent that when someone was trying to learn devops and saw a book on the (virtual) shelf that didn't cover containers next to one that did, they'd pick the latter every time. You probably saw this in your sales tanking. But I'm not sure many of the words you actually did write became wrong or unimportant either. That's what I mean by additive. And in the context of a CS program, even if their students were trying out these algorithms with ridiculously out-of-date, turn-of-the-century tools like CVS, they'd still have something that works, as opposed to fumbling because they have no concept of how to manage their computing environment.
The way DevOps evolved was sort of a mess anyway but welcome to tech.
I sort of agree more broadly but I can also see a lot of students rolling their eyes at using outdated tools which is probably less the case in other disciplines.
While this comes out of CSAIL, I wouldn't ascribe too much institutional recognition to this. Given the existence of independent activities period, it's probably a reasonable place for it given MIT's setup. Other institutions have "math camp" and the like pre-classes starting.
It's probably a reasonable compromise. Good schools have limited bandwidth or interest in remedial education/hand-holding and academics don't have a lot of interest in putting together materials that will be outdated next year.