High-level languages were absolutely indispensable at a time when every hardware vendor had its own bespoke instruction set.
If you only ever target one platform, you might as well do it in assembly, it's just unfashionable. I don't believe you'd lose any 'productivity' compared to e.g. C, assuming equal amounts of experience.
Those are garbage-collected environments. I have some experience with a garbage-collected 'assembly' (.NET CIL). It is a delight to read and write compared to most C code.
Type checking, even that as trivial as C's, is a boon to productivity, especially on large teams but also when coding solo if you have anything else in your brain.
If you only ever target one platform, you might as well do it in assembly, it's just unfashionable. I don't believe you'd lose any 'productivity' compared to e.g. C, assuming equal amounts of experience.