I think I agree with the placement. It's definitely a good skill, I wouldn't dispute that, but it really is advanced/infrequent by the standards set here.
Historically that wasn't true, but Stack Overflow has made it vastly easier to answer simple questions ("Which 'ls' flag shows permissions? How about hidden files?") without ever using a man page. You can go a long time without ever touching that and not have problems, while jumping to man pages without experience tends to be an overwhelming jumble of flags and conditions.
Which isn't to say it's low value! Learning Linux well beyond "good enough" is still an enormously worthwhile project. But I do think it's correct to say it's no longer an entry-level step.
Historically that wasn't true, but Stack Overflow has made it vastly easier to answer simple questions ("Which 'ls' flag shows permissions? How about hidden files?") without ever using a man page. You can go a long time without ever touching that and not have problems, while jumping to man pages without experience tends to be an overwhelming jumble of flags and conditions.
Which isn't to say it's low value! Learning Linux well beyond "good enough" is still an enormously worthwhile project. But I do think it's correct to say it's no longer an entry-level step.