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If you use ASP.Net MVC it's a lot less magic and more predictable than using webforms... That said, Razor with C# is a really nice template engine. The integration is far nicer, and more predictable than any other I've used. These days I'm targetint React under node/iojs which I would say is far more magical...

Entity Framework is also a really nice ORM for most small-mid sized projects... If you're really stuck on using a strongly-typed environment I will say that C# is one of the better ones and would choose it any day over Java (and a lot of others). My issue with many .Net and Java projects is that a lot of "enterprise" design patterns are used when they are more in the way than helpful. Abstractions are used which only improves testing or portability, but neither testing or portability are used. But this is more of a design choice from the developers than the languages/platform used.

I also disagree with your reference to .Net/C# not having a large ecosystem... There are a lot of tools for C# out there, most open-source and easily available via Nuget. Not to mention that Stack Overflow has authoritative answers to almost anything you could need with .Net or C# and has MS employees as regulars to offer support.

This is from someone who doesn't even write much C# any longer (still supporting two legacy apps in C#), and does most of his development being deployed to Linux servers.