I'd agree if you talk about "most projects". But here we're talking about a platform - you can't fault Microsoft for caring about performance! .NET is absolutel

I'd agree if you talk about "most projects". But here we're talking about a platform - you can't fault Microsoft for caring about performance! .NET is absolutely not meant only for small sites, my current employer is heavily invested in .NET and we'd probably be dead (performance-wise) without async. Definitely couldn't run our services with PHP (not without Facebook-like investments), we already outgrew that kind of traffic.