I sometimes long for the simplicity of something like Windows Forms.
Sure, with the knowledge I have now I could set up a whole MVC model with event based updates to form state, but at some point you're just rewriting the complex libraries that you're trying to avoid.
Good interactive state management, especially when you're tying to combine it with a stateless protocol like HTTP, is very difficult. Every complex library that's out there started off as a "simple way" of doing things.
There's nothing stopping you from doing Windows Forms applications of course, and the modern evolution of ASP.NET does look pretty inviting if you're over all that frontend crap, but don't underestimate the problem libraries like Angular solve. Microsoft tried it with Blazor, and that'll quickly get you a website that's a hundred megabytes in size because it downloads all of .NET into your browser.