Yes, very much yes! Compiler pipeline is highly decomposable and can be taught in pretty much any order. Which one to teach first is really the matter of importance (like, I learned physics by starting with dynamics and as a result I have a good understanding of dynamics but not much for subsequent topics like thermodynamics, optics or electomagnetism...). I do agree the importance of parsing is currently overstated, but its solution has to be topic-agnostic as you can't build compilers only with parsing or codegen.