I think you touched close to an opinion of mine which is anything lower lever than c becomes very hard for ordinary people to work in. I remember DSP's in the 80 and 90's. Where to program them you needed to deeply understand how the machine worked. And guess what eventually manufacturers ported C over to them so that programmers could be productive when working on the non-performant parts of the code base.

If anything modern processors are even worse under the hood. With the added problem that you can't feed one of them raw 'true' instructions fast enough to keep them from stalling.