I hear this so often

"this is no better confusion-wise"

"this is no better style-wise"

"this is no better C-standard-wise"

Is embedded a process of making the progremmer happy or about making the chip happy.

I will do everything I can to avoid the above, when such does not make the process less efficient.
What is to be preferred a) a bit of 'confusing' C or b) write a piece of assembler. YES, I know that is not the issue here, but I have run into that example far more often and the case is analogous.

I have seen examples of interrupt latency variance being a non-problem till some unrelated feature was added and then a "debugging nightmare" ensued. How often have I heard "the modification has nothing to do with this problem, it just popped up" and found that, indeed, "the modification had nothing to do with the problem", it just happened to show it. If you write code that rely on some things being just fast enough, I wish you happy debugging.

Erik