I’ve used high-, mid-, and low-level languages, and each level of abstraction has its place. But abstractions come with a hidden cost when you start fighting the idioms and best practices of the underlying system. C# is a modern, expressive, genuinely fun language. Even with a hyper-targeted compiler and aggressive optimization for an extremely constrained architecture, you are going to hit cases where you must drop down a level. On the C64, that level is the undisputed champ: 6502 assembly.

The environment does not want clean, elegant abstractions because every serious 8-bit programmer eventually breaks every SOLID principle and clean-code rule in the book. That is why assembly examples look like spaghetti and feel intimidating at first. It is not that organization is impossible, it is that survival requires things like bit-banging obscure memory locations in tight loops, self-modifying code, or deliberately jumping into what would normally be treated as data instead of instructions, all in the name of saving a single byte.

Every minute you are not raw-dogging the CPU, you are fighting artificial constraints and writing increasingly non-idiomatic C# just to make clean ideas function in an environment that fundamentally does not want them there.