I can agree with that approach, because I used it to write a C compiler for a fantasy console I made (Vircon32). Since it has a fully custom ISA and set of chip

I can agree with that approach, because I used it to write a C compiler for a fantasy console I made (Vircon32). Since it has a fully custom ISA and set of chips I could not use something like LLVM, so I wrote it more "manually". The first versions were very barebones (they supported little more than variables, expressions and if/else), but over time I expanded it to support loops, arrays, pointers, structures... nowadays it's still not a full C compiler but it has been good enough for me to write several full games reliably, and even a few people have been using it too.