In that regard, a case can be made that when you're writing in C, you're writing exactly as close to the bare metal as if you're writing in, say, Go or Haskell.
No, you really can't. This is childish black and white thinking. The computational model of C is built on an interface exposed by the hardware. Go and Haskell build many additional abstractions on top of that same model.
This article could have had a fruitful discussion about what the author is trying to say, but by choosing such a clickbait title, he managed to turn it into a discussion on semantics that wants to deny useful distinctions, because in some context (not the context in which it's actually used), it doesn't fit.
This kind of linguistic wankery really pisses me off, because it's useless and rests on a misunderstanding of how people actually use language (which is to say, in context and often in relative terms).
Haskell, Go, et. al. are understood to have complex runtime machinery atop the x86 instruction set. It's an erroneous belief that C does not (and one that I've seen developers get bitten by repeatedly as they try to manage threaded C code).
