I mean, the ones who were actually _writing_ a C compiler, sure, and to some who were in performance critical spaces (early C compilers were not _good_). But no

I mean, the ones who were actually _writing_ a C compiler, sure, and to some who were in performance critical spaces (early C compilers were not _good_). But normal programmers, checking for correctness, no, absolutely not. Where did you get that idea? (The golden age of looking at compiler-generated assembly would've been rather later, when processors added SIMD instructions and compilers started trying to get clever about using them.)