And conversely you don’t have access to a few things assembly can do: arbitrary stack access, PC register, flags. Some operations like bit rotation, zero bit counting, or fancier addressing modes have informal code patterns with a hope they’ll optimize right, but nothing guaranteed in the standard.

Pretty much a matter of optimization isn't it? Try disabling them. But I take it that this was never the point anyway. I think the point is that the representation of language objects and the runtime are rather straightforward compared to many other languages.

Only one of those (inlining) is an optimization. Two are language features (implicit casts and volatile) and the other is a calling convention (passing arguments on registers vs. stack).

Calling conventions aren't (mainly) a C feature either though, but are defined by the ABI specified for a specific OS/CPU combination (and all languages which want to talk to system APIs need to implement that ABI, not just C).