Yes, this is normal for languages. The only pushback here is against the term “portable assembler” being applied to C, where it’s incomplete often enough that many people feel it’s no longer a helpful label.

I think it’s also reflecting the maturity and growth of the industry. A turn of the century programmer could relatively easily find areas where dropping down to assembly was useful, but over the subsequent decades that’s become not only uncommon but often actively harmful: your code hand-optimized for a particular processor is likely slower on newer processors than what a modern compiler emits and is definitely a barrier to portability in an era where not only are ARM and potentially RISC-V of interest but also where code is being run on SIMD units or GPUs. This makes the low-level “portable assembler” idea less useful because there’s less code written in that middle ground when you want either a higher-level representation which gives compilers more flexibility or precise control. For example, cryptography implementers want not just high performance but also rigid control of the emitted code to avoid a compiler optimizing their careful constant-time implementation into a vulnerability.