You are correct, they serve as a convenience and conciseness feature. However, the way they are implemented lends itself well into ASP.NET Core’s requests hand

You are correct, they serve as a convenience and conciseness feature. However, the way they are implemented lends itself well into ASP.NET Core’s requests handling pipeline which means that traditional controller-based pattern is actually more expensive. The fastest option when using min apis is to take HttpContext directly, which is convenient anyways when you are outputting raw bytes.