When C was invented, K&R C, it was hardly lower level than other systems programming languages that predated it, since JOVIAL in 1958.
It didn't not even had compiler intrisics, a concept introduced by ESPOL in 1961, allowing to program Burroughs systems without using an external Assembler.
K&R C was high level enough that many of the CPU features people think about nowadays when using compiler extensions, as they are not present in the ISO C standard, had to be written as external Assembly code, the support for inline Assembly came later.
I think we are largely saying the same thing, as described in the introduction of the K&R C book:
C is a relatively "low level" language. This
characterization is not pejorative; it simply means that C
deals with the same sort of objects that most computers do,
namely characters, numbers, and addresses.[0]
It didn't not even had compiler intrisics, a concept introduced by ESPOL in 1961, allowing to program Burroughs systems without using an external Assembler.
K&R C was high level enough that many of the CPU features people think about nowadays when using compiler extensions, as they are not present in the ISO C standard, had to be written as external Assembly code, the support for inline Assembly came later.