https://vivekhaldar.com/articles/when-compilers-were-the--ai...

He provides some sources (7) at the bottom of the article.

To pick one, the following has a video interview with one of the founders of Fortran:

https://www.ibm.com/history/fortran#:~:text=Fortran%20was%20...

So we're not making up stuff, this perspective was ubiquitous among assembly programmers of the 1950s. In 1958 (as the first article I link to mentions), half of programs were written in Fortran. Which means half of people still thought writing assembly by hand was the way to go.

I've personally written assembly by hand for money on an obscure architecture, and I've also written a non-optimizing compiler for a subset of Rust to avoid the assembly. There is great joy in playing stack tetris, but changing code requires a lot of effort. Imagine if there weren't great alternatives, you'd just get good at it.

  I had been hired to write a FORTRAN compiler
  for this new marvel and Mel was my guide to its wonders.
  Mel didn't approve of compilers.

  ``If a program can't rewrite its own code'',
  he asked, ``what good is it?''

Though to be fair The Story of Mel supports rather than refute the argument against compilers.

The joke story is mocking the common arguments/beliefs at the time.

If you expect me to source you a collection of comments about "real programmers" from over 30 years ago though that is too much of an ask but I was there, I read it often and I started fairly late on the scene in the 90s.