What always scares me away from assembly every time I try to learn it is that principle that makes code more dangerous or rigid or difficult to evolve, the more manual work you have to do in it. Like how it’s harder to refactor C code than Python because of how the implementation and algorithms get closer to each other the lower you get. And since assembly gives you almost nothing, changing an algorithm seems to mean massive changes. Which implies heavy up front design work. Which is contrary to the kind of exploration and experimentation I like to have in my side projects, especially video games, which is presumably the main type of program for NES.