I learned MIPS assembly and there were brief references to x86 assembly, and I know most of my friends would do fine with assembly, but, alas, most engineers I've known barely even know what memory management is, so being able to create proper abstractions with assembly would definitely be out of their league.

It's vaguely similar to how JS and Node enable so many people to flood the market without really knowing the underlying technology. Many of those would definitely not pick up assembly (which is the entire point I was trying to make)

Hell, I did a Physics degree, and I had to learn assembly (the NS 32k), which wasn't a huge issue alongside the 6502, Z80 and m68k that I already knew.

Now retired (come join the dark side, we have cookies) but still a few years away from what people would call "retirement age"

I think some still do. But writing a few lines of code in some computer architecture course isn't really enough. It's not just the language, it's the libraries and not understanding how things work under the hood.

I remember back in 2014 we had a class in assembly (we used x86 assembly running in DOSbox). One of the projects I most vividly remember was writing a simple paint program controlled using the arrow keys.

by the 90's more like struggle through a single, one-semester course that had a unit and some labs on assembly.

That was 40 years ago when we had 5.25" discs in school. In todays schools (up to 16-18), nobody knows what Assembly is, even the teachers.

Used to be everyone learned assembly in college.

I imagine that was x86, which was relatively easy but also horrible. Very few people are writing assembly today because you'd need to be able to do x86-64 SIMD, ARM64, and maybe RISC-V, which are all quite a bit more complicated.