Removing the viewstate and using more ajax are merely a modernisation of webforms. Fundamentally you are calling for what webforms was actually doing, ie generating a UI, binding it to a database and dealing with the boiler plate code in between.

The problem with these all-in frameworks is that they are very good at giving you a fully functional and OK looking app in a few clicks. But from there they work against you. You don't want to expose everything in the database to the user, or you want to include some custom validation logic, or you are dealing with some data that is partially normalised, or you are mixing SQL and noSQL data, etc. And then you are fighting the framework to hack something together that the designers didn't intend. And after a few years you realise it is less work to do it yourself with a bunch of helper methods.