So, I have never seen anyone actually use GOTOs, so maybe a lot of the stigma comes from excessive, poor usage or something.
However, having written a good chunk of ASM in my life. I don't think jumps or branches are really that hard to follow. Jumps/Branches and GOTOs specify the next location. It is not as though one has to guess where.
It's not the arrow, it's the archer that is the problem.
Never as in, in BASIC, or you've never seen goto in C? The de-fanged C "goto" is all over the place in Linux and in similar close-to-metal C software. C does not (yet, likely C2Y will fix this) have labelled break, so goto is used to say "I am inside a mess of nested loops, we're done, end the loops" and as a catch-all failure handler in some codebases.
My guess is that your ASM is inflected by structured programming everywhere. Yes, unlike COME FROM we can see where we're going next with GO TO but if you go back 60+ years there is some scary code that even today's optimizers probably wouldn't emit because it's too crazy. Suppose calculate-total-fuel ends with three CPU instructions which copy register F into register H then add register C to it and multiply the sum by four. Over in locate-horizon it so happens we need to add two things together and multiply them by four and we could do that last. So, if those two things were in registers F and C we could just GO TO that last part of calculate-total-fuel.
You're correct that we don't need to "guess where" it goes, but good luck understanding why the program works when it's like this, let alone the ordinary maintenance work of making small modifications.
However, having written a good chunk of ASM in my life. I don't think jumps or branches are really that hard to follow. Jumps/Branches and GOTOs specify the next location. It is not as though one has to guess where.
It's not the arrow, it's the archer that is the problem.
My guess is that your ASM is inflected by structured programming everywhere. Yes, unlike COME FROM we can see where we're going next with GO TO but if you go back 60+ years there is some scary code that even today's optimizers probably wouldn't emit because it's too crazy. Suppose calculate-total-fuel ends with three CPU instructions which copy register F into register H then add register C to it and multiply the sum by four. Over in locate-horizon it so happens we need to add two things together and multiply them by four and we could do that last. So, if those two things were in registers F and C we could just GO TO that last part of calculate-total-fuel.
You're correct that we don't need to "guess where" it goes, but good luck understanding why the program works when it's like this, let alone the ordinary maintenance work of making small modifications.