> The quote I recall reading about long ago summarized the semi-official guidance as "write C like you write ASM".

You could read that in pretty much any book about C, until the mid-00s. C was called "portable assembler" for the longest time because it went against the grain of ALGOL, Fortran, Pascal, etc by encouraging use of pointers and being direct to the machine. Thus why it only holds a viability in embedded development these days.

I've written C on the PSX, using contemporaneous SDKs and tooling, and I've reviewed source code from games at the time. There's nothing assembler about it, at least not more so than any systems development done then or today. If you don't believe me, there are plenty of retail PSX games that accidentally released their own source code that you can review yourself:

https://www.retroreversing.com/source-code/retail-console-so...

You're just arguing for the sake of arguing at this point and, I feel, being intellectually dishonest. Believe what you'd like to believe, or massage the facts how you like; I'm not interested in chasing goal (heh) posts.