Agreed - EF code-first, Nuget, and ASP.NET MVC in general are excellent steps in the right direction away from excessively tool-oriented / ultra-bundled / abstracty type things. The very dark days were pure ASP.NET web forms with controls, DataSets, DataTables, ClientScriptBlocks, and the like.
A lot of things in VS are wrappers around very well-documented CLI tools, e.g., svcutil, and I don't begrudge these tools for doing a lot of heavy lifting.
A lot of things in VS are wrappers around very well-documented CLI tools, e.g., svcutil, and I don't begrudge these tools for doing a lot of heavy lifting.