I'm not sure that's actually true? I thought I did cshtml pages without all the MVC bits around MVC 3 or 4.
Is this perhaps just a branding/naming thing?
Update: Haven't found a good reference yet, but it seems to have been around when WebMatrix was still supported, but I don't think I actually had to use it to develop the site that was cshtml files.
Update 2: ASP.NET Web Pages with Razor Syntax was what it was called. https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/aspnet/web-pages/overview/g...
I'm not going crazy!