Various assembly languages have various exotic features. I didn't even get into discussing which particular assembly we may want to talk about. Still, DJNZ is still a conditional jump, not a loop. You tell it where to jump if some counter is not yet 0, you don't tell it which instructions to repeat. The two are of course isomorphic concepts, but still different.

And I absolutely agree there is value in understanding the mechanics of how languages are executed. What I disagree with is that this is necessary for being a good programmer, and that it is useful as an initial learning experience.

Programming itself didn't start with assembly. It started with pseudo-code, which was always expressed in a high-level format, and then manually translated to some form of assembly language for a particular physical machine. But people have never designed their programs in terms of assembly - they have always designed them in higher level terms.