It tried to make web dev look like Winform devs, which Winform devs liked. It's no different from JSF and all that stuff and make sense in the enterprise context. If you are writing APIs, then no it doesn't. Ironically ASP.NET MVC is kind a going back to XML like declarative syntax, because it's actually useful. And Angular 2 is close to JSF/Webforms in spirit... the irony, things that looked obnoxious to JS hipsters and now hip again ...