I've been developing with .NET since version 1.1. I feel like it's always been pretty easy to use for beginners. You install Visual Studio, create a new project and BOOM you've got a program that builds and runs.

Having used Turbo Pascal and Turbo C prior to Visual Basic and Visual C, Microsoft's "Visual" IDEs and other Windows based IDEs of the 90's were a step up in ease of use even if they did require more files to build a project.

They indeed started years ago. For some time it's possible to run project with a Program.cs file that doesn't contain a static class. There's also the so called the ASP.NET minimal API. And .net scripting got official support a few releases ago.