git on the command line is the power tool. The VS Code plugin is the training wheels version.
These tools the TFA discuss are powerful, but have a learning curve. VS Code has a flatter learning curve, but it's up to you to decide if they are abstracting away things you actually need to understand.
All abstractions serve a purpose, but they're also always leaky. To extend your assembler analogy: sometimes you actually do need to understand what's happening on the stack and the heap, most people never do.
Use what works for you, but don't think that abstractions will be enough for every scenario, sometimes you're going to need to get under the hood and go deep, and if all you ever do is hand-wave it away and hope your IDE/framework/chosen programming language interpreter or compiler is going to just "sort it out" for you... well, good luck with that, and I hope it works out for you. It's just not my lived experience after 30+ years in the industry.