Oh nice, I was talking just yesterday how I liked chips as a programming paradigm.

I agree about tooling, I made a pacman game in a dcpu16 emulator in a couple of days.

   https://fingswotidun.com/dcpu16/pac.html

I experimented with a fantasy console idea using an in-browser assembler as well. https://k8.fingswotidun.com/static/ide/

I think you can build environments that give immediate feedback and the ability to do real things quickly in ASM. I would still recommend moving swiftly on to something higher level as soon as it started to feel like a grind.