"Back in the day", pre-RISC, with fancy macro assemblers (like Turbo Assembler), programming in assembly was actually not that bad. C is obviously better, but not actually as much better as people seem to think.
Nowadays life would be a lot worse in assembler, because CPUs are designed to be programmed mostly by compilers, not humans.
(Also, the ways in which C is better than assembly roughly correspond to the ways in which our query language would be better than SQL. Like, say, variable scoping.)
One of the best assembler IDE was Turbo Pascal 6.0. One would write begin/end, stick asm block in the middle and the rest will be in assembly. Full debugger support too, it was very convenient.
Nowadays life would be a lot worse in assembler, because CPUs are designed to be programmed mostly by compilers, not humans.
(Also, the ways in which C is better than assembly roughly correspond to the ways in which our query language would be better than SQL. Like, say, variable scoping.)