People said it about assembly when it came out. The actual (binary or octal) machine codes gave you an intimacy with the hardware that assembly took away. (People actually said that.)

If you like "intimacy with hardware" you can drop down one level below machine code and design a processor on an FPGA with Verilog. Or, to go even deeper, design a custom circuit with SPICE.

C might be the optimal point on the abstraction ladder as far as the trade off between (exposed) complexity and control.

You can go still lower. You can create custom transistors. You might even create custom semiconductor substrates...

... and there we stop. Nobody gets to create custom atoms.