What Woz did was the default way of writing assembly language programs for owners of 8-bit computers (mostly hobbyists). You didn't have money for a second machine, so you wrote your program on paper, you entered it then tested it in situ. Mostly you got it right, as doing it on paper was slow and meant you had the opportunity to put lots of thought into it. 8-bit instruction sets were simple enough that you eventually learned the most common instructions by heart. There was a point where I could mostly translate a Z80 program from assembly to machine code from (my) memory.

Maybe that is part of the nostalgia for the 8-bit days: the practice of "slow programming"? It was relaxing, sort of like those "slow tv" shows.

For the sequel to this, see:

https://www.folklore.org/MacBasic.html