The footnote on their sentence about assembly programmers: “I mean, I dunno. I'm not a historian. This is a vibes-level historical reconstruction. I would be curious if this is way off base though”

So, yeah. They just made it up because it felt right. (Which, I guess is what one would expect from AI related stuff these days.)

You’re definitely right though: it doesn’t take a deep dive into the history of computing and programming languages to find higher-than-assembly level languages emerging at the very dawn of computing.