Well.. to be fair as a tutorial on assembly language the linked article (which does nothing but make a C-linkage function (main) to call another function (printf)) is going to be a better choice.

Things like system calls and program startup are more advanced topics you'd introduce later, even if they make for shorter code.

And to nit even further: your example is "lower level" but still relies on a metric ton of magic being executed by the linker. If you're allowed to "just invoke ld" the OP's "just call and return from main" trick doesn't sound so bad.