The ceremony and boilerplate got reduced a bit with the newer versions of ASP.NET - you can definitely write clean looking WebAPI code without much ceremony.

The newer idea of middleware pipelines in ASP.NET do a good job of hiding some boilerplate and there are even libraries like Flurl or Polly (which is now officially a part of .NET, itself) that reduce the code you have to write for things like http requests and resilience policies.