Knowing how to read asm is super useful, and once I would have recommended writing asm as the best way to learn to read it. I still think everyone should write

Knowing how to read asm is super useful, and once I would have recommended writing asm as the best way to learn to read it. I still think everyone should write some asm, and not just friendly mips or riscv asm, something with a few warts and some redundancy, and some intrinsics. But reading the output of modern optimizers isn't really related to the type of asm that mere mortals write, you only get better at that by doing it. Looking at the outputs of perf reports and using godbolt a lot seem the best route. Maybe you'll never need any more performance than a naive implementation in python can give you, but it is like any other stack of abstractions in that knowing a little bit about the layers you don't work at makes you do your job better.