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Many features of C do not directly correspond with most modern assembly languages. You cannot predict the exact assembly it will generate without knowing a lot of details about your compiler and platform, and even then it's often iffy. It seems like a bit of a leap to call something "a minimal abstraction" if you can't even correctly describe how an operation in the abstraction corresponds to operations in the lower level.

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That's mainly the result of optimizer passes, C itself doesn't have much to do with it.

Assembly languages actually haven't changed all that much since the 70's, but compilers have improved a lot. The output of early C compilers did indeed match the source code quite closely (and not just on the PDP-11), but even today that's true if you disable optimizations (and even with optimizations is usually pretty straightforward to map the C source to the assembly listing - if you're somewhat aware what optimizer passes in modern compilers are doing).

Of course CPU ISAs are already human-friendly abstractions over what's actually happening down in the hardware.

C has everything to do with optimizer passes, the language definition is what allows them to happen! The fact that you get about what you'd expect on -O0 is merely incidental, the specification does not afford you this.

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