How is asking for direct access to the hard drive akin to a malicious program?
It's not per se but there is a reason this type of access is a bit more involved than just using the filesystem. Unless someone is writing a low-level util or something there is never a reason to gain direct access to the hard drive.

Here is a snippet from the original post:

Is there ANY way using C, C++, and/or assembly that lets you directly access memory of a computer? Like the actual basic hard drive in bytes or something. ....
...directly access memory of a computer...

Yeah they are called variables and arrays. Why would you want to access any memory except that which you own or have allocated in a thread or DLL?

Like the actual basic hard drive in bytes or something. ....

First the memory bytes have nothing to do with the hard drive bytes (with the exception of virtual memory). You normally access the hard drive bytes via a filesystem that has folders and files. Low-level access is possible but rarely needed.

So the simple answer is we access memory every day in every program we write. If you are accessing files then you are accessing hard drive bytes.

Hence my suspicion.