I don't expect people to write assembly code, but I do expect them to at least understand it. So I've put an 'explain what this code dump does' part in my team's interview process.
Oh, interesting, could you share an example? It could be anything from strlen() to some SIMD optimized super loop of doom, so I'm curious what it is like
It’s nothing too complex really, they’d be expected to know what a memory access looks like and the branching mnemonics. So they’re given the code and explain their understanding of it and maybe try reverse-engineer it back into C/C++ etc.
reasoning about SIMD code on an interview is a really high ask for a non-specialized position. I'd not even know all of the instructions w/o a reference.
OTOH Assembly (w/o the vector instructions) is generally like a very simple C [I'd exclude some of the memory barrier on weaker memory modes as well]
(This obviously wouldn't apply to web dev roles.)