Strictly speaking, yes. But you should think of it as a formalized abstraction over that; a way to reason about something you can easily translate into a bunch

Strictly speaking, yes. But you should think of it as a formalized abstraction over that; a way to reason about something you can easily translate into a bunch of goto statements. It's just like how all if/then and function call constructs compile down to goto, as well. Some languages will offer more abstraction over this, but you can still do such constructs in assembly language if you want to by hand-holding the machine through every step. If you do find yourself writing assembly language (or C, for that matter!) then you should do just that; implement high-level constructs at the low level with a bunch of jump statements. The resulting code is verbose and superficially seems gnarly, but will also be far more scalable and robust. But there are compilers for a reason! There are some examples of automatic FSM to C compilers elsewhere in this thread. Some very high-level languages have embedded domain languages for FSM generation as well.