> Abstractions. They don’t exist in assembler. Memory is read from registers and the stack and written to registers and the stack.

[...] But my application-coded debugging brain kept looking at abstractions like they would provide all the answers. I rationally knew that the abstractions wouldn’t help, but my instincts hadn’t gotten the message.

That feels like the wrong takeaway for me. Assembly still runs on abstractions: You're ignoring the CPU microcode, the physical interaction with memory modules, etc. If the CPU communicates with other devices, this has more similarities with network calls and calling the "high level APIs" of those devices. For user space assembly, the entire kernel is abstracted away and system calls are essentially "stdlib functions".

So I think it has a different execution model, something like "everything is addressable byte strings and operates on addressable byte strings". But you can get that execution model occasionally in high-level languages as well, e.g. in file handling or networking code. (Or in entire languages built around it like brainfuck)

So I think assembly is just located a few levels lower in the abstraction pile, but it's still abstractions all the way down...