But that's approximately as true for other programming languages. (EDIT: Good point elsewhere in the discussion where it’s pointed out that assembly is significantly more verbose than nearly any other language so it’s desirable to keep it short.)

It'd be interesting to see an editor mode that could jump back and forth between a mnemonic view and a more descriptive one, perhaps even with argument labels to get rid of src vs. dest confusion.

I think much of the "modern confusion" around assembly code comes from being mainly exposed to raw disassembled compiler output instead of "sane" assembly code written by humans.

Back when writing assembly code was more or less mainstream, "high-level" macro assemblers were used to wrap assembly snippets into fairly advanced macros which could lead to assembly code that was nearly on the same abstraction level as C code, you could define structs, named constants, write complex constant expressions and so on..

There were also dedicated assembly IDEs like ASM-ONE on the Amiga or Turbo Assembler on the PC, which made assembly programming quite comfortable (I guess the same can be achieved today with relatively little effort by writing a VSCode plugin).