You would be surprised how much it is used still in embedded dev. Picking an embedded board that can, with low level coding, just run your target software is generally far cheaper and power friendly than something more powerful. On millions of devices being produced every cent counts and on wearable devices every hour battery life counts.
For instance, in our case and the case I know best, we could use a full 32 bit ARM arch in our hardware but we do not; we retarget a very simple microcontroller with a few kilobytes of memory for this because it is far cheaper and far less power hungry. Result is that we have to use asm or C with quite a high % of asm. We decided to use only asm because it makes the audits easier too. Because of this work I got to meet many manufacturers and these components are in a lot of appliances and are often coded in asm.
For instance, in our case and the case I know best, we could use a full 32 bit ARM arch in our hardware but we do not; we retarget a very simple microcontroller with a few kilobytes of memory for this because it is far cheaper and far less power hungry. Result is that we have to use asm or C with quite a high % of asm. We decided to use only asm because it makes the audits easier too. Because of this work I got to meet many manufacturers and these components are in a lot of appliances and are often coded in asm.