Most assemblers have higher-level features like macros built in to make it easier to write. Once you start building abstractions (as Chris surely would've done) it becomes more manageable, but of course, still more work than writing C.

Instead of talking about that, spare a thought for the awful x86 memory segmentation mode[1] --- now that sucked.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X86_memory_segmentation