I don't think the point was to eliminate "code that looks like memset at the assembly level", but to eliminate memset at the source level, which the author cons

I don't think the point was to eliminate "code that looks like memset at the assembly level", but to eliminate memset at the source level, which the author considers cleaner. Under the covers, one would hope a good optimizing compiler could choose the same assembly for both, which may very well look "memset like" since fewer, wide writes are generally more efficient.