The meta point from the article is that this is as much a hardware problem as it is a language or developer one. An arms race was waged to create CPUs that are

The meta point from the article is that this is as much a hardware problem as it is a language or developer one. An arms race was waged to create CPUs that are very effective in running sequential programs; to the point that what they present to the program is a very much a facade and they hide an increasing great deal of internal implementation detail. By David's postulation, even the native assembly language for the CPU is not low level. To drive this juxtaposition home, I'd point to PALcode on Alpha processors in which C (and others) can very much be a low level language. Very few commercial processors let you code at the microcode level. The overarching premise is then brought home by GPU programming, which shows that you don't necessarily need to be writing at the ucode level if the ecosystem was built around how the modern hardware functioned.