It's incredibly frustrating. I've been on the .NET wagon since ASP.NET 1.0 (and ASP before that), and my day to day friction with .NET has been increasing steadily over the last few years as more and more of the eco system starts to support "core".

Looking over an example doc of how to host .NET in IIS (by far the most common approach) really shows how out of control it has become: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/aspnet/core/publishing/iis

It's a mess.

Hosting in IIS with .NET Core is no different than before, it all works the same. Only difference is that IIS won't be running the code but just acting as a simple proxy so you turn off the "Managed Code" setting in the application pool for that site. Than just web-deploy like before and everything works.

All those other settings are settings that were there before.

Does restarting the app pool reload the application? What about changing the config file?

Is IIS just configuring http.sys at this point? Are modules still invoked during the request?

That's because it's IIS. Setting up apache is similarly difficult.

There's nothing stopping you just using self hosted websites.