In places where you can use C you can just ask easily use C++. It has a number of nice ergonomic improvements that make it a better option than C, though you would typically opt out of exceptions, RTTI, and maybe the standard library.
I think when 20% of your code is trying to energize a solenoid or wrangle a temperature sensor and another 20% is trying to make the vendor's awful LCD controller do something useful and not insane you'd be just as happy writing the mnemonics for machine code instructions and you'd spend less time staring at diagnostics trying to guess why it's doing whatever it's doing because your ten year old fork of GCC has a bug.
Yes obviously. Or potentially Zig once it is more stable.
Doing it in assembly in 2026 is absurd.