> "I also just can't get past the argument that people said the same thing when we switched from everyone using ASM to C/Fortran etc."

There was no "switch"; the transition took literally decades. Assembler and high level languages co-existed in the mainstream all the way until the 1990s because it was well understood that there was a trade off getting the best performance using assembler (e.g. DOOM's renderer in 1993) and ease of development and portability (something that really mattered when there were a dozen different CPU architectures around) using high level languages.

There is no need to get past the argument because it doesn't exist. Nobody said that.