There are alternatives, but most of them have been "consumed" in that ASP.NET does what they do better (most recently "ASP.NET Minimal API" removed a lot of the appeal for many of the smaller alternatives), or "consumed" because "ASP.NET" the brand also includes the low level HTTP machinery at this point and alternatives are increasingly "ASP.NET + some extra framework" which doesn't sound like an alternative, or are focused on small niches and other languages. There's a lot of fun alternatives in F# (Giraffe is the first one to my mind), but obviously that is no longer web development in C#.
I really wish suave wasn’t abandoned. We could have such nice things in F#-land but all of our the cool stuff gets dropped in favor of veneers over ms frameworks.
I agree, "Minimal API" owes a lot to Nancy, specifically. There were a few others in that space, but Nancy was definitely the big one that pushed ASP.NET the most.
