I did a shedload of programming in CP/M back in the 80s, and frankly I'd rather do it in Z80 assembler (assuming we were targeting Z80-based systems) than the rather poor compilers (not just C compilers) that were available. Using a compiler/linker on a floppy-based CP/M machine was quite a pain, as the compiler took up a lot more space than an assembler, and was typically much slower.
And I like writing assembler!