I think of it more like "direct" control over the hardware, like no RTOS and no framework, just your binary code running directly by the processor, and accessing the hardware features via registers.

With the ESP32 it seems that this is not something reasonable to do, as most things require extensive setup that is implemented in the framework.

Like we used to code in the 8 and 16 bit days of home computers.

The language runtime is the "OS", and you talk directly to io ports and memory addresses.