You are correct, they serve as a convenience and conciseness feature.
However, the way they are implemented lends itself well into ASP.NET Core’s requests handling pipeline which means that traditional controller-based pattern is actually more expensive.
The fastest option when using min apis is to take HttpContext directly, which is convenient anyways when you are outputting raw bytes.
I thought the minimal APIs were just a bit of syntactic sugar over the same underlying architecture.
Are you saying they are actually different in a more fundamental way?