I don't know. Certainly the PC had a lot of options, but it wasn't impossible. My first piece of commercial software was written entirely in x86 assembler and had to navigate things like graphics card options and multiple sound card options. It could be done, it was just a lot more of a PITA.

Once I was doing 3D I quickly started moving everything but the inner loops to Turbo C, because I'm not a total masochist :)