Most of the stuff went over my head, Why should I care that C is no longer low-level? What exactly is considered close-to-metal in today’s time, apart from binary and assembly?
The author is confusing two completely different things and comes to a wrong conclusion.
He states that C isn’t low level because CPU are much more complex today. But those aren’t related. His argument would be no different if he claimed assembly isn’t a low level language.
That the CPU speculatively executes instructions and maintains many levels of cache doesn’t change that C is low level. Even if you wrote a program in OP codes you can’t change that.
There was a single paragraph to support his argument that was optimizing compilers can create machine code wildly different than what might be expected.
Then he goes off on a complete tangent of how C isn’t good for parallel processing which has nothing to do with his thesis.
C may not meet the authors definition of low level, but is still far lower level than most viable alternatives.