Maybe. But the cost is abstraction. Assembly is as close to bare metal you can get, without going into complete binary mode. 
The following examples are borrowed from https://courses.cs.washington.edu/courses/cse378/03wi/lectures/mips-asm-examples.html:
A simple program
i = N*N + 3*Ncould in assembly be written as
lw $t0, 4($gp) # fetch N
mult $t0, $t0, $t0 # N*N
lw $t1, 4($gp) # fetch N
ori $t2, $zero, 3 # 3
mult $t1, $t1, $t2 # 3*N
add $t2, $t0, $t1 # N*N + 3*N
sw $t2, 0($gp) # i = ...
However, this isn’t an optimized solution.
lw $t0, 4($gp) # fetch N
add $t1, $t0, $zero # copy N to $t1
addi $t1, $t1, 3 # N+3
mult $t1, $t1, $t0 # N*(N+3)
sw $t1, 0($gp) # i = ...
See how complicated it gets real fast? Right here, we are only adding and multiplying numbers, nothing fancy at all. Your compiler would catch such an easy optimization, but you might have spend an hour to figure it out. That is what’s meant by abstraction. You sacrifice a bit of speed (sometimes it’s even negligible) in order to not have to write at such a low level.