Yeah, you can get away with minimal C# stuff if you want. Mind you minimal API's is a relatively new thing as of NetCore 6 so GP might not have had the chance to touch these new things yet.
Much of the older overdesigned pain of C# is that it used to be tied to how IIS wanted things to work, NetCore initially pivoted more to DI stuff before pivoting again to these minimal API's but the DI stuff is definitely available(and used) still.
For pragmatic choices it's all there, you can start off with minimal API's and get far with it and once you start feeling pain-points as you want to re-implement things it might be time to add in the more "frameworky" parts.
You can also use DI without having to use interfaces for everything. It's easy and possible to inject straight dependencies from concrete classes into constructors, without all the abstraction (beyond allowing constructors being called for your dependencies and injected into your controllers). I'm a big fan of using services with an unabstracted database context from EF Core, rather than ever making use of repositories. I can still go from a MVC project with concrete views, over to Web API with a completely JavaScript frontend framework, without needing to change any of my business logic. Approximately 10 years ago, I was lost in all the abstraction you'd find in tutorials and any book on ASP.NET MVC, but experience has taught me a LOT, as well as working with other languages and seeing the (lack) of ceremony needed to get things done.
By "used to write", I'm guessing maybe they worked in the .NET Framework/IIS era, which did have a cognitive cliff to climb. You could get used to the ceremony though and then your brain started to ignore it and focus on the stuff that mattered. These days it's much easier though.
Much of the older overdesigned pain of C# is that it used to be tied to how IIS wanted things to work, NetCore initially pivoted more to DI stuff before pivoting again to these minimal API's but the DI stuff is definitely available(and used) still.
For pragmatic choices it's all there, you can start off with minimal API's and get far with it and once you start feeling pain-points as you want to re-implement things it might be time to add in the more "frameworky" parts.