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That's a good point. It is pretty intertwined with ISAs. But, I think you could successfully argue it's just C semantics leaking into the ISA. C was so incredibly successful that it's hard to appreciate sometimes that all the systems (abstractions above and below) that touch it came to embrace and conform to it's semantics.

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In a lot of cases, we could argue that ISAs have been shackled by catering to the specific details of C. But if we're just referring to the CALL instruction (and its equivalents), that's not a reaction to C, it's a reaction to structured programming, which was a good thing.

Whether a CALL instruction (by whatever name) does anything with the stack is ISA dependent. On ARM, the BL instruction saves the return address into the LR register and performs a branch, much like the B instruction.

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