Hmm, maybe my opinion is just shit in that regard. I don't code terribly much low-level, so I'm probably overestimating the complexity and underestimating the options for cleaning things up.
That was kind of just a random example, I felt like there were many more cases where low-level code is complex, but I'm probably basing this off of shitty low-level code and forgetting that shitty high-level code isn't exactly a rarity either.