+1. Part of the problem is that x86 assembly is hardly programming the metal anymore. The performance characteristics of processors has changed over the years also, compilers can be more up-to-date than humans.
It would be better to say that "Metalness" is a sort of "Feature Set". IMO, most programmers would tend to agree that C++ is far closer to Java than C is, yet C++ is every bit as low level as C is. Indeed, even a managed language like C# supports raw pointers and even inline assembly if one is willing to get their hands dirty.
Low and high level languages have two definitions I have seen, one is more objective, but utterly useless: only assemblies are low-level, everything else is high. The other one is more about what can be controlled in a given language’s idiomatic usage, I believe that’s what most people actually refer to intuitively - e.g. C#/Java have ways to manipulate pointers, but you would generally not say that.
In that regard, C, C++, Rust are quite close to the metal with the latter two actually being even closer as they have native control over SIMD datatypes as well, while C doesn’t have that. Note, this is only a partial ordering, as e.g. C#/Java also have control over vector instructions, yet I wouldn’t go around claiming them closer to the metal as C.
Going back to expressivity, C++ is very expressive, while C is very inexpressive, but that is a completely orthogonal axis.