I think it depends on your experience. I have a lot of experience from the Old Days™ and from developing for microcontrollers, so I find reading assembly very natural and straightforward. When coding for the really small MCUs I've often had the disassembly generated and shown on another window every time I incrementally build, and can check and make sure it's what I was expecting to see.

I do agree that knowledge of compiler optimizations is really important to working this way, though you'll eventually pick them up anyway. I don't see much value in looking at -O0 or -Og disassembly. You want the strongest stuff the compiler can generate if you're going to do this, which is usually either -O3 or -Oz (both of which are strong in their own ways). -O0 disassembly is... just so much pain for so little gain. Besides, -O3 breaks more stuff anyway!

For someone without this level of experience (and who isn't interested in learning)... yeah, I can see why you'd want to do this another way. But if you've got the experience already, it's plenty fast enough.