Well, while I understand, what you are trying to say (a simple crud web api should be easy to accomplish), I think that you were just overwhelmed by amount of possibilities, tutorials and outdated information, because C# / .NET is evolving fast.
That said, you may take a look at my small very early state pet project `tonehub`[1], which can be seen as pretty modern CRUD Web API in 2022, utilizing swashbuckle for OpenAPI, JsonApiDotNet for CRUD, Entity Framework 6 for Database, HostedServices for background tasks and some other nice concepts (DI / IoC, Options Pattern, FileStreams, etc.). I could also use SignalR for WebSockets / Realtime, integrated OpenID/OAUTH2 Authentication, FluentValidation for validation, Api Versioning and much more.
I've never accompilished something like this with this small amount of code...
That said, you may take a look at my small very early state pet project `tonehub`[1], which can be seen as pretty modern CRUD Web API in 2022, utilizing swashbuckle for OpenAPI, JsonApiDotNet for CRUD, Entity Framework 6 for Database, HostedServices for background tasks and some other nice concepts (DI / IoC, Options Pattern, FileStreams, etc.). I could also use SignalR for WebSockets / Realtime, integrated OpenID/OAUTH2 Authentication, FluentValidation for validation, Api Versioning and much more.
I've never accompilished something like this with this small amount of code...
[1] https://github.com/sandreas/tonehub