Very good question!

The problem assembly programmers had with compilers wasn't that they wouldn't understand the generated machine code - it was that the generated code was often bad (as in unoptimized and bloated) and didn't justify the resources required to run the compiler. As hardware got more complex and powerful, compiler got much better, and operating systems became the primary layer between hardware and applications, assembly became more niche. Nowadays it's pretty challenging to beat the compiler at generating efficient assembly and writing a program in assembly would consist primarily of OS and library API calls anyway.

There are definitely parallels there. The only obvious difference I can see is that both high level language code and assembly are unequivocal in their meaning (as in you can determine what gets executed), whereas natural language is not.