I agree with your sentiment. It's probably a legacy left-over from the .NET Framework days where you had to choose upfront what app you are going to build and w

I agree with your sentiment. It's probably a legacy left-over from the .NET Framework days where you had to choose upfront what app you are going to build and where it was going to run and then you had the full IDE experience configured. .NET team has made a lot of right steps to fix this, however they haven't fixed MSBuild. As a long-term .NET developer (not anymore sadly, but still find it the best development experience) I always found MSBuild confusing but it has only become harder to learn because it has too much going on under the hood. So, if you want to do what you are saying, you should look into learning more MSBuild because .NET certainly allows you to do that without workarounds if you have your build configured correctly.