> You could attempt to make the claim that assembly is no longer a low-level language

Assembly expose instructions that C was never meant to work with. Compilers force C to do so anyway. If you had a compiler that converted 8086 x86 assembly to modern x86 or CUDA bytecode; I'd consider that pretty equivalent.

LLMV intermediate representation is probably more low level (closer to the real compute model it runs on) than that theoretical 8086 x86 compiler.