Like you say, trying to learn to do something in Asp.net core can feel like pulling teeth. I'm usually surprised to find there's a first party library that does what I need, yet I couldn't find it for hours.
I have complaints about Laravel, but I think it's a lot easier to find examples, and modern PHP has static typing improvements. But I would much rather use C#
It’s honestly a really underrated framework, smartly designed, with probably the best ORM that exists and a great ecosystem.
Unfortunately, the documentation is painfully bad and the Getting Started guides are really boring compared to Rails or Django.
There may also be Laravel but I can’t say anything about it since I never tried it.