C's memory management is its own abstraction. malloc and free are library functions. They're an abstraction not just over hardware (that doesn't have anything bytewise allocated like that), they even abstract away the way operating systems allocate memory.

You don't get direct access to the stack in C either. Stack frames are abstracted away, and you only get longjmp.

If you pay attention to Undefined Behavior and strict aliasing, you don't even get that much access to poking around memory.