The new async Razor engine in .NET Core is ridiculous. They threw out view helper functions and support for functional/monadic control flow for what, so you can

The new async Razor engine in .NET Core is ridiculous. They threw out view helper functions and support for functional/monadic control flow for what, so you can asynchronously render a string? Insane. I suspect the actual motivation is that async is virtually required to address performance problems associated with the new tag helpers - which are themselves a terrible, terrible idea. Slow, brittle, surprising, wholly reliant on syntax highlighting, and then redundant because you can implement the same functionality using the existing C# syntax.