I think this is a false comparison, and I believe cognitive science will show this to be true over time.

"Now, many years and programming languages later, with my coding skills in LSI-11 opcodes totaly athrophied, I do not regret about loosing that skill at all."

But the cognitive capacities you developed reasoning about opcodes almost certainly made it easier for you to learn FORTRAN and its successors.

LSI-11 opcodes, FORTRAN 83, C++, the lambda calculus, etc are all formal languages that we can reason about logically. It's also the case that we can implement machines (hardware or virtual) that can in practice produce the results that match our logical deductions. This is generally what people mean when they say these languages are "deterministic".

It seems obvious to me that it is more cognitively demanding to reason about formal languages like these, to prove to oneself that a given change in the code will produces the outcomes you intend, than it is to prompt for changes in the code and review it.