> The difference is that now it is worthless

Writing whole software projects in assembly has been worthless and pointless for a couple of decades now. Even the projects who can put together a solid case will limit assembly to very specific components executed only in specific bits of a hot path. Perhaps the most performance-sensitive code we have today is high frequency trading and that field is dominated by C++.

Also, virtually all mainstream compiler suites have flags that output assembly,and that feature is largely ignored and unused.