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> Back then assembly language was much more ergonomic than it is now, and the machines were simpler.

In a way that's true. I also enjoyed writing assembler back then, especially on 68k.

However, to really extract the last cycle you often ended up generating a block of code at runtime (kind of very basic JIT).

Sometimes self-modifying code provided the final oomph to get something running fast enough. The reasons varied: sometimes it was because of running out of registers, sometimes dynamically changing the performed operation without branch.

Too bad for the later CPUs with instruction prefetching and caching...