Honestly, I learned it once upon a time, but I use it so rarely that use it or lose it kicks in. Nowadays, I use AI to generate regex because I never use it in prod anyway (mostly I use it to parse logs, as a last resort). But, had I never learned it, I wouldn't be able to direct ai to generate it..

As with every question worth asking: depends. Small-ish project, don't imagine a lot of data migrations, performance is important? Dapper.

Project with A LOT of entities, I imagine a lot of iterations and data migrations, etc? EF.

I'd say observability is the first step. How much time does each part of the code path you're optimizing taking? Perhaps it's not your C# code which needs optimization, perhaps it's your queries, or your http calls. We host our APIs in Azure KS and our first step is always looking at App insights.

I reject your definition of what makes a Christmas movie.

Ah OK, you added a property with the same name and made that readonly.

But here's the thing, the whole point of the primary constructor is to not have a declaration and an assignment line per dependency in my code. So this ends up being almost the same sadly :(

Wait, in your first image, why is the reassignment of the logger underlined with a squigly, and does it throw an exception/warning during build?

I do like they get rid of ceremony code, I do have two minor concerns: no null checks on the passed arguments and no way to make the injected dependencies read-only which is what we currently do right now.