As does anyone who writes entirely in assembler.
A high level language allows the designer to think like a designer, design the system from the top down and removes from the design process any need to worry about trivial details such as which variable are on the stack and so on.
I don't know anyone who does any serious embedded systems design who even cares what variable are on the stack or any details like that because the compiler handles the messy details.
Obviously you need to know how the processor you are working with works and you need to know the details of the hardware its connected to.
I work in an office where if my boss for example found out that i had spent half a day worrying about some trivail detail which could be handled automaticaly by the compiler I would be out on my ear. Where I work they are quite happy for you to spend 6 months developing an algorithm and they will leave you alone to do that but if they find you are taking the piss by hand coding some bubble sort routine then thats it you are finished.
In the real world its getting working systems out the door and making money that matters not buggering about writing everything in non-portable spaghetti code which only one person understands and only one person can work on.
Only this week i had to look at some HDL code someone had written 6 years ago and it was a case of looking at the code, seeing what it was meant to do and going 'oh I see where the problem is, fixing it and copying the fixed code into the source tree and Bob's your uncle jobs done.