I looked at Fresh a while back and it looked a fun and "easy" route into assembler.
Do they still have the Mandelbrot sample? IIRC, the trick is to get the pre-assembler to generate a binary image of a Mandelbrot set. No actual runtime code involved. Very cool.
Tldr I think this project is delightful and that I am a target user who will be downloading this and giving it a try today.
I've only ever watched Been Easter do some 6502 assembly on his YouTube videos, but not did it demystify the scary machine language for me, especially since he did it after building an entire 8 bit computer starting with just a D flip flop. It makes me want to program my boring line of business application in vhdl then have a custom circuit board printed haha.
But since that is rather crazy, I'm watching projects like this to wear my way into assembly language programming.
Sidenote, I wonder what it is about assembly programs that triggers antivirus software so much.
Granted malware has probably been written with assembly before, but that shouldn't mean an entire programming language stack should have to constantly submit false positive reports.
For me assembly programming is something I enjoy dabbling with from time to time. If you're not looking for strictly practical assembly programming...
Check out the TIS-100 and EXAPUNKS games. Fun little assembly language oriented games, although they can get quite hard later on (never finished either of them).
If you want to dip your toes programming something palpable and you have an Arduino (with ATmega chip) you can program those in assembly. I did just that back in 2015 and wrote a small (Linux oriented) tutorial on how to get started and some sample code https://gist.github.com/mhitza/8a4608f4dfdec20d3879
If you want to go down the retro assembly route, for something completely useless. I can suggest you get a dosbox instance up and running, and check out computer virus magazines from the late 80s/early 90s. 40HEX and 29A come highly recommended as they had their own beginner virus writing guides. And Ralf Brown's Interrupt List for all BIOS/DOS interrupts ("API calls").
I've played a bunch of Zachtronics games, and I enjoyed all of them. My favorite is probably Shenzen I/O, it's also assembly oriented but you also to figure out how to communicate between multiple microchips. Fun game.
Do they still have the Mandelbrot sample? IIRC, the trick is to get the pre-assembler to generate a binary image of a Mandelbrot set. No actual runtime code involved. Very cool.