[latentsea]

I dunno, there's definitely stuff that's convenience related, sure, and then there's stuff that's less so. Things like MediatR, Dapper, Serilog, Refit are all pretty common in .NET projects. There's usually always some library for generating PDFs for reporting purposes etc. The ecosystem of NuGet packages is pretty large. It's definitely not all just Microsoft dependencies, nor is that usually how developers in the ecosystem think in my experience.

[int_19h]

OP might be remembering how things were 10 years ago or so, before .NET Core became the .NET. Although there are still many companies with legacy codebases running on .NET 4.

That aside, dependency graphs in .NET land still tend to be much smaller.