Never thought of it beyond what I wrote - mostly voicing my own personal frustrations with learning languages. I finally had to learn C/C++ in university, and was quite good at it, but avoided programming until I learned Perl some years later.

I do think that if one is an engineering student (not necessarily CS/CompE), then it's more useful to teach how to do useful stuff (e.g. automation) in languages like Python. In my day most schools used either C/C++ or Java - both of which are not very useful for people whose primary job is not coding. Engineering students would take that one course and that's it. However, I suspect most engineers will benefit greatly if they knew Python. Lots of tedious stuff to automate.

Even if the introductory course uses Python, I think they should cover useful tasks for automation - handling directories, and perhaps some basic network related stuff via requests. If you can't squeeze it into one course, make another one and make it mandatory. It'll be more useful than many engineering courses they'll take.