Yes, of course. There are problems or portions of problems where direct hands-on control of the bare metal gives better performance, sometimes spectacularly be

Yes, of course. There are problems or portions of problems where direct hands-on control of the bare metal gives better performance, sometimes spectacularly better performance. Programming in assembly language for this kind of problem is often simpler than trying to make a compiler do what's needed. As the size and complexity of the problem grows, the structuring and abstraction support of programming languages provide win out. And, of course, the last refuge of the assembly language programmer is the optimization and code generation phases of a compiler where reasoning about programs at a very low level pays off.