I realize your question is rhetorical, but there are tons of people. Anyone new to programming, in a CS course that uses git, for example, would be familiar with basic git but many would be unfamiliar with the path (or on Windows).

I concur, but they need not stay unfamiliar with it. The concept is easy: When you type the name of a program and hit enter, I look it up in a list of directories to see the first one that contains a file with that name. That list is $PATH. Any programmer will have to deal with search paths and stuff at some point in their life, and probably very early on, when they'll want to run their own scripts.

I agree that most programmers will run into $PATH at some point, but why force an order on them? Maybe they just want to get started using things like fancy diffs provided through package managers like npm.

git is a content tracker.

People who don't need to edit PATH might still need to track content.

Git is a revision control system.

Nodejs is a programming language.

NPM is a tool to fetch libraries for node programs.

Thus NPM and Git are software development tools.

A software developer or a power user are supposed to know what $PATH or %PATH is.