Sorry, but I'm not understanding that question.

People don't care about the transistors inside the core. They want working programs.

And having an hw-assisted debug method is an excellent way to learn how to make that processor jump when ordered to jump. What more can you demand from debugging tools? Hw-assisted debug methods are supersets of a sw monitor. So back to you. What do they learn about the basics of the 805x with a monitor that they do not learn with "real" debugging support?

Assember is nice, but not needed to learn how to use new processors. The majority of processors are very similar so it's enough with basic knowledge of the architecture to get very very far. Normally all the way to commercially and environmentally viable, commercial-grade, products.

People do gain much more by learning the behaviour of the hw accelerations of the UART in processor A, or power save modes in procesor B, or CAN filtering in processor C. It's normally these peripherials that is the difference between a suitable processor and a bad selection. Not how well the user knows the exact clock count for the multiply instruction, or if the instruction set as both a subtract and a reverse-subtract machine instruction.

Same with knowledge if the processor have memory-mapped registers, or "real" processor registers only accessible through dedicated instructions.