I've been using dotnet and aspnetcore for years. I've heard people complain about MVC but I never really saw the problem. The controllers are easy to set up for basic endpoints, I have my domain models and DTOs, and our views I guess is our standalone webpage just consuming jsons.

Only now I'm having to work with an *actual* aspnet MVC stack - server-rendered cshtml and all - and it's dawning on me like a truck what people were actually referring to.

Out of all the issues I've had so far, they have all been due to black box enigmatic voodoo because don't worry about it, the framework takes care of it - it should just work. But what if it doesn't? I have no idea because the trail ends at the bit that should just work.

I should know better than to criticize an entire framework and paradigm made by devs with vastly superior experience and expertise than me, and my issues are absolutely due to being new and unfamiliar with this, but imagine coming up with an architecture to obsessively separate the MVC concerns, then you make cshtml.