I would argue that ASM isn’t “powerful”. It’s direct. You can access advanced features of a CPUs architecture with the trade off limited portability. Sometimes it’s necessary but power comes from being able to express complex control and data structures in a concise and readable amount of text.
The subjective topic of what “concise and readable” means is where the language wars come in.
Google did a rollback of anti-SEO indexing features because the intention is that users issue more searches. Ever since the ads side of the business won the war for the soul of Google the experience has gotten worse on purpose.