Having cut my teeth writing asm on 386/486 in ms-dos, these comments are kind of hilarious to me because Pentium is well into "you can write most of it in C" territory.
By the P2 era (97-98), especially as consoles show up, assembly's not desirable at all.
Pmode/w was released in 97 which speaks to the demand for a Watcom C/C++ protected mode extender at the time...
I don’t think necessity has anything to do with it being written in assembly in the first place, it’s just Sawyer’s background was in porting others’ titles and it was just what he was used to using