This is a very good description of precisely what happened. People forget that Pascal & C compilers were not only unusual/academic, they were also very expensive - $300-$500 or more, and C was not ubiquitous then, pascal was more common, and (like C) there were several incompatible variants competing for marketspace. For a young person who has (perhaps only barely) been able to afford a Commodore, Atari 400/800, TRS-80 or the more expensive Apple ][, and additional huge expense for a compiler was very likely out of the question.
I was in a computer club and I remember a big bearded guy from IBM (one of the club founders) introducing a new programming language called "C", and thinking "why bother, when you can just code in assembly?"
My experience was with the Apple ][.
Instead of Pascal or C, almost everyone went from Applesoft Basic straight to assembly, with LISA being the tool of choice. (Laser Systems Interactive Symbolic Assembler - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lazer%27s_Interactive_Symbolic... written by Randy Hide, a noted Apple 2 expert who also wrote this guide: http://www.appleoldies.ca/anix/Using-6502-Assembly-Language-...)
We had 1Mhz. One "core". 48kilobytes of addressable ram (actually less, once the buffers for video space were subtracted). That's an extremely limited space.
Of course the workflow was awful. boot up. Open your editor. Edit your source code. Save to disk. Quit your editor. Run the assembler. No errors? quit and exit to DOS. Reboot & run your new code. (If the program were large, boot to DOS tools disc and copy the code from one floppy to another, then boot that new floppy.)
Lather, rinse, repeat.
Applesoft Basic and Assembly were enough for me, until I took my first professional programming job in the 80s and learned Pascal to code for the Lisa and then the Macintosh. I learned C in the late 80s for Windows 2.1, 3.0 and then C++ (beginning with the Microsoft C++ beta compiler distributed on something like 20 5.25" floppy disks. I moved to C# as soon as Microsoft introduced DotNet and others in the decades since, but I never had as much pure joy as the time I spent on my Apple ][. I still have it, and remarkably it still runs 100%, and most of my floppy discs (memorex! gorilla!) still work, even though I used a "nibbler" tool and used both sides. At $5 each (!!) for 80k of storage we had to stretch the budget.