And you frequently do do assembly level coding, either because you're cheap and need to eliminate every byte, or because you're trying to slap an 'accidental backdoor' on there to steal all your users coins...

Well, DLTs are supposed to abstract away the distributed-ness. The execution layer usually provides computational primitives, basic memory and cryptographic functions. Not much distributed computing there.

who did you write that for?

its more similar to distributed microcontrollers by a matter of fact that the nodes don't allow much processing and there are many nodes that replicate the function. it is less similar to simply microcontrollers or simply distributed computing.