Because contrary to urban myths, C is a normal high level language like everything else.
The Assembly like abilities have been growing as language extensions in specific compilers, not as part of ISO C.
Going back to K&R C, inline Assembly or intrisics were not even available, all of that required using the Assembler directly.
Not every high-level language gives you byte-level access to the representation of memory objects.
But it is also wrong to reduce a language to what is in the spec.
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