I'm not sure it was more accessible though. Learning programming back then was really hard. Nothing was user friendly and achieving even simple tasks like drawing a diagonal line might require you to sit down and learn Bresenham's Algorithm (from the books neither you nor your library had copies of, naturally...). So it was easy to get discouraged. You can get fun and relevant results much faster now.
Back in the days of Turbo Pascal you had to know what you were looking at when the memory modified breakpoint went off and you got dumped to the assembly level. And you really had to understand it to deal with the 200mhz bug (there weren't convenient solutions at hand when I first hit it) or when I ended up making extensive modifications to the real mode support in the DPMI mode--never saw that mentioned anywhere. It was nasty--the library was fundamentally flawed and clearly had never actually been used as it declared real mode pointers as "pointer"--which had a very high chance of causing a segment error when the compiler emitted code that copied them by loading them into a segment:offset then storing them. And the debugger was flawed: in single step mode it was emulating, not executing. And the emulation would correctly "execute" an invalid segment register load.
Now, though, in C# I have yet to have any reason to look at assembly.
Besides, it's an exaggeration. I've been programming for 35 years, and in fact got started on Turbo Pascal as one of my first languages. I wrote OWL code! Seeing the screenshot of that splash screen brought back memories. But I feel I can understand and debug problems that cross almost any layer of the software stack. Anything from some ReactJS library to kernel code to UEFI. I'm now 42 so the idea nobody can understand or debug interactions across layers before they die is for the birds. The stack isn't that deep.