There are a huge number of software engineers today, dare I say most, who cannot read or write assembly and are isolated from it by multiple layers of abstractions.
I would probably struggle to write assembly without difficulty and blowing something up but... is most macro assembler really that hard to read? The examples the author of the article gave seemed reasonably easy to parse out for anyone who has a conceptual model of control flow, variables, memory locations, and basic operations.
You can generate machine language without an assembly language intermediate phase, if you just directly put bytes into a file. But most compilers have some kind of assembler in them.
I could be mistaken, but, don't JVM languages avoid assembly steps? They use bytecode and are translated directly to machine code; I'm not sure there is an translate-to-assembly step. I'm also not sure how much of this confusion is semantics vs actually different components of the compilation and running process.