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Anecdotally, I've always felt that what makes low-level seemingly hard is that documentation is either sparse, or written in an extremely dry way that is not engaging for a lot of people. Lower level stuff is prone to what I like to call "man-page syndrome"; i.e. when the resources for a software tool or conceit are presented in a kind of mathematical/formulaic format that average people can't be bothered to parse.

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While the documentation can be hard for a novice, it's actually one of the reasons I like low-level programming. If the docs exist, they are generally clear and concise: Instruction mnemonic, parameters, result, flags, maybe number of cycles. That's about all you need to use the information effectively. It also makes browsing the documentation easy if you're a nerd like me who flips open specs and standards to read random sections and learn something new.

One of my favorite experiences was programming for a TI MSP430 uC. My memory is that the reference documentation was outstanding, though that was true of all of the chips I worked with in embedded.

I have never worked with that one for real, but I did look up the docs while playing around with Micro Corruption years ago. And yeah, it had good documentation.

https://microcorruption.com/

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