C# tilts in that direction for sure - but it doesn't have the layers of XML BS to reach the good old Java (the only XML conf I remember touching in .NET Core wa

C# tilts in that direction for sure - but it doesn't have the layers of XML BS to reach the good old Java (the only XML conf I remember touching in .NET Core was when I had to configure IIS for Azure deploys). I've left C# ecosystem 3 years ago because I was done with that as well, but then I landed in a mature Ruby on Rails project and I was crying for .NET "enterprisey" abstractions - once you see the code duplication that comes from the fat models and controllers, you have to grep the codebase and guess what happens in a function because it's in a mixin that assumes property exists in context, tests take forever to rerun because they bootstrap an entire environment and have no mocking. If I had to chose between a bad C# codebase or a bad RoR codebase if it's beyond something very simple I would chose C# one any day of the week - which is what I think C# approach gets you - guarantee that if you follow the conventions your project will scale reasonably well into maintainability and codebase size. You pay for that in initial development speed and pointless verbosity.