I agree it's unnecessarily feared. At its core, it lacks a lot of complexity.
But actually writing asm is an experience straight from the 80s. Compared to modern languages, the tooling is simply antiquated. I noticed this once I started writing larger sections of asm at a time. It's "fine" in the same sense that writing makefiles is "fine" - it becomes a PITA after a certain size.
I think there's lots to improve on the current state of asm, but it's just too niche. The only power users I know are hobbyists working on operating systems and games for retro hardware.
Also add cryptographical people to that list. A friend of mine told me that they create 'constant' time algorithms.
These have to written in assembly otherwise the compiler will try to speed up the algorithm. But then you can theoretically measure the execution time of encrypting and reverse engineer the possible keys.
But actually writing asm is an experience straight from the 80s. Compared to modern languages, the tooling is simply antiquated. I noticed this once I started writing larger sections of asm at a time. It's "fine" in the same sense that writing makefiles is "fine" - it becomes a PITA after a certain size.
I think there's lots to improve on the current state of asm, but it's just too niche. The only power users I know are hobbyists working on operating systems and games for retro hardware.