This exactly. If you are doing embedded programming, direct register access and manipulation is often a far, far superior option, and you don’t have to be some kind of “assembly sensei” to do it if you just have a very basic idea of how things work. It doesn’t mean you write programs in assembly… it means when you are needing to do something that the hardware is going to do for you anyway, you know how to ask for it directly without having to load a 2Kloc library. This is especially true when using python or JS bytecode on the MCU. Actually, using python with assembly is really the best of both worlds in many cases.