I was programming 40 years ago and was very happy to be able to use "high-level languages" and not write everything in assembly. The high-level languages enabled expressiveness that was hard with lower levels.
In 1985, any time I needed any level of performance on my 1Mhz Apple //e, I still had to use assembly or when BASIC didn’t expose the functionality I needed. Mostly around double hires graphics and sound.
