I think my dad could corroborate that. He was very deep into PIC programming about 10-15 years ago and ran into similar issues, enough that he decided to just write everything for them in assembler (mostly POCSAG/pager related stuff). He then created one of the first full visual PIC emulators to help him debug code, although it was then quickly surpassed by things like PICsim. I think he would also place all of this under some of the most extreme tech problem solving he did before retiring.