It is the case that you can more easily know what happens when you don't use the wrong abstractions but stay in control. Highly-abstracted C++ code basically makes allocations and syscalls in the whitespace between the source code tokens. You can't do systems software like that, you have to roll back the abstractions and roll back the use of pre-canned containers and libraries that you don't understand.

So it's all about understanding and control, not about some idea that C was defined in terms of assembly instructions, which it obviously is not. That's a total strawman.