Really it's much better than it used to be. The people I don't envy are those like my past self who had to contend with .NET 2.0 web forms, the AjaxControlToolk

Really it's much better than it used to be. The people I don't envy are those like my past self who had to contend with .NET 2.0 web forms, the AjaxControlToolkit (and really UpdatePanel in general), bloated heaps of ViewState... the list goes on, and I haven't even gotten past ASP.NET. Most of the improvements that have been made in the last 10 years (aside from maybe async/await, but that pattern is pretty ubiquitous at this point) have served to reduce the amount of idiosyncrasies, not increase them. In general, web programming has increased across-the-board in complexity manifold, regardless of your server-side language. Aside from that I find writing C# to be very succinct and logical these days compared to the past, even taking into account my own learning.