But I believe that's the article's very point: the context and relative terms people often talk about C are incorrect. The amount of mutation delta between a C

But I believe that's the article's very point: the context and relative terms people often talk about C are incorrect. The amount of mutation delta between a C program and the corresponding assembly instructions is significant, but people continue to believe it is not, which results in all sorts of incorrect assumptions when reasoning about a C program (such as which line of code or statement executes "first"). Haskell, Go, et. al. are understood to have complex runtime machinery atop the x86 instruction set. It's an erroneous belief that C does not (and one that I've seen developers get bitten by repeatedly as they try to manage threaded C code).