I still don't understand how people were able to write software in the days when assembly was the only option for speedy execution.
For me it would be sort of like writing programs in C versus higher level languages: much more tedious, will take longer and require better planning/upfront design, but doable.
With practice you learn some tricks that can seem clever to anyone not writing a lot of asm. It’s “just” a very low level language IMO.