“Low level language” is one of those terms like “VLSI” (very large scale integration) where they defined it in the 70’s or something, so the academic definition is out-of-sync with what most people would expect.

This is fine, it’s a term of art and those don’t need to be immediately obvious.

I don’t like the title of this article for that reason, though. Really a better title would be something like “a modern x86 processor is not a PDP-11.” The subtitle is perfect basically.

Edit: also IMO it is not really fair to beat up on C for this, the problem is not really one of low-level-ness. A language that actually exposed the complexity of speculative execution and all that could be pretty high level. It would just be harder to read in a linear text editor, right? We’d be better off drawing the dependency graph or something.