> Assembly to Python creates a lot of Intent & Cognitive debt by his definition, because you didn't think through how to manipulate the bits on the hardware, you just allowed the interpereter to do it

I agree! You often see this realized when projects slowly migrate to using more and more ctypes code to try and back out of that pit.

In a previous job, a project was spun up using Python because it was easier and the performance requirements weren't understood at that time. A year or two later it had become a bottleneck for tapeout, and when it was rewritten most of the abstract architecture was thrown out with it, since it was all Pythonic in a way that required a different approach in C++