During the Covid period, I decided to look at using the PIC divices from Microchip. I too had little experience. I bought a Micro-x training kit with the PICkit4 from Kanda.com specifically due to the Assembly and C training that is offered with this kit. I also bought the older AVR kit but have not got into AVR as yet.

My understanding is that MPLAB X IDE's after v5.30 dropped the Assembler but offered the new PICAS method of including Assembly sections within the C program. This was not very popular with older Assembly programmers.

I decided to use older MPLAB X versions that included the Assembler so that pure Assembly programs could be written and tested. I use Linux (Ubuntu) operating system, so needed to use MPLAB X IDE v5.05, which was the last IDE to include the Assembler for Linux OS systems. Windows I think had it in version 5.30 for both 32 ad 64 bit systems.

Using these older MPLAB X IDE's with an Assembler included allows an asm file to be assembled before downloading to device. The newer IDE's that use the XC8, XC16 or XC32 Compilers are used for C programs and can also compile the newer PICAS style of programming.

I still run an older version of Ubuntu, a 32 bit version 16.04Lts using a dual boot on my machine that also has the newer 64 bit OS running Ubuntu 22.04LTS. I think the best is to try setup a dedicated HDD and format and install an older OS that can run the older MPLAB X IDE's if you really wanted to write pure Assembly programs.

Hope this info is helpful.