Both ISA-level assembly and C are targeting an abstract machine model, even if the former is somewhat further removed from hardware reality.
Assembly is not about corresponding to exactly which gates open when in the CPU. It's just the human writable form of whatever the CPU ingests, whereas C is an early take on a language reasonable capable of expressing higher level ideas with less low-level noise.
I seriously doubt anyone who has written projects in assembly would make such comparisons...
With genuine respect, I believe this type of insinuation is rarely productive.
Someone might still have silly opinions, even if they have been paid to write assembly for 8-24-64 bit cisc, risc, ordered and out of order ISAs, and maybe compilers too. Peace :)
This should not be mistaken as appeal to authority, it is merely reasonable discrimination between those speaking from experience, and those forming opinions without experience.
If one believes those with experience has poorly informed opinions, they're always free to gain experience and associated perspective. They will then either have the fundamentals to properly push their viewpoint, or end up better understanding and aligning with the common viewpoint.
If you use
mov %i0, %l0
or %g0, %i0, %l0
What I meant to say is that since there is no way to directly write microcode, assembly is the lowest level software can target.
Nobody claimed that. It corresponds to the instructions the CPU runs and their observable order.
Also it's really only x86 that uses micro-ops (in the way that you mean), and there are still plenty of in-order CPUs.
It's still much closer to the input machine code compared to what compiler optimizer passes do to your input C code ;)