I know MSFT technologies get a lot of hate here, but ASP.NET Core is pretty awesome. Blazor (the wasm based framework) is innovative and a positive step forward frontend web development.

You should leave your prejudices aside and give it a try if you haven't yet.

Since you seem to have a positive sentiment towards Blazor, can you point me to a good introduction that demonstrates the power and the benefits of the framework, e.g. increased expressiveness, reduced friction, etc? I've looked through a couple of intros but they never seemed to really sell the benefits of it. As someone who loves the C# language and .NET ecosystem I really want to like it but nothing has clicked so far.

Yes, sure. In my opinion, these are the main features:

1. You can have all the benefits of a static-strongly typed language such as C#. Which implies: better tooling, less prompt to type errors, and more suitable for enterprise software.

2. You get the full power of .NET in the browser

And, if you are already using ASP.NET for your backend:

3. You can reuse a lot of code. This means almost no class duplication (like when you work with TypeScript).

Extra:

4. Blazor is pretty similar to Angular +2, so the learning curve is smooth if you either have experience with Angular or C#.

Will we ever have an alternative UI framework that eschews html and CSS, perhaps rendering to webgl or something?