I don't think anyone is overlooking anything, because it should be pretty clear this code is a template, meant to be modified to fit the project style. In part

I don't think anyone is overlooking anything, because it should be pretty clear this code is a template, meant to be modified to fit the project style. In particular, that's not in assembly (we were talking about assembly), and uses arduino-style digitalRead and HIGH/LOW constants, which simply do not not exist on PIC12F629 or any other MCUs with 64 bytes of RAM. Translating this to non-Arduino would likely be done by replacing digitalRead with appropriate macro and removing "pin" argument. But if you want to talk more generally about atrocious state of firmware development, where people are just copy-pasting code from internet without understanding what it does, then yeah... there seems to be something in firmware development which encourages sloppy thinking and wild experimenting instead of reading the manual. I've seen people struggle to initialize _GPIO_ without the helpers, despite this being like 2-3 register writes with very simple explanations in the datasheet.