C is not all that close to the machine. It mostly works in an analogous way, but there have been plenty of times I've been frustrated by having to write a lot of complex, hard-to-reason-about C when the equivalent assembly is like 4-5 instructions. Types especially introduce a bunch of extraneous garbage that isn't at all related to what the machine does or what the program is trying to accomplish. Then, if you look at the generated code, it's ugly and not easy to follow at all, filled with unnecessary stuff.

Actually I don't recal the name any longer, but TI used to have a DSP Assembler that was pretty simplified C, something like for the expressions

    dest = src1 op src2;

Only basic control flow, no structured loops and so forth