It's completely true in reality. I've used .NET for the last 4 startups and use various layers as needed for performance and flexibility. I know many other peop

It's completely true in reality. I've used .NET for the last 4 startups and use various layers as needed for performance and flexibility. I know many other people and companies doing the same, and it's one of the main advantages of how much .NET gives you to pick and choose from. ASP.NET is not a single monolithic thing, the Core evolution has made everything modular and you can plug and play the parts you want. You can use just routing to translate URLs to endpoints, or just the view engine, or just the serialization bindings, or just razor pages, or just MVC, or just low-level HTTP responses, or just GRPC, or anything else. The entire pipeline is a series of middleware, which itself layered on the Kestrel webserver, which itself is layered on low-level sockets wrapped with Pipelines and Memory APIs. There is no one-size fits all, and asp.net explicitly recognizes and solves for it. The issue might be your expectation that there is a small/light and large/heavy framework. There isn't, you just make one to fit you.