Comment by zerkten

It's contextual. For me, WebForms fell down because it let the average web developer impose too many "costs" on internet-facing projects. A WinForms developer is a very specific kind of developer with a high focus on development of internal, or line-of-business (LOB) apps. WebForms also excelled at this, but brought more reach as people moved away from a preference for desktop apps.

The height of WebForms coincided with an embrace of web standards and accessibility which flows into the Web 2.0 era. You had to jump through a lot of hoops to achieve what was needed WebForms to get it to behave in a web-friendly way. The underlying .NET framework and base of ASP.NET (HttpHandler and HttpModule) was outstanding though.

(I still build/maintain WinForms, ASP.NET, and WPF apps.)