Webforms was designed in a time when people wanted web applications to look like windows applications. This was a dark time on the internet where developers were forced to learn page lifecycles and deal with horrible view states and 3rd party controls which would cause such bloat the very fabric of the internet would be shaken...
That is Webforms, an archaic technology that is better left forgotten, and people who say otherwise should also be forgotten.
Like another answer says, MVC is the latest way from MS (although it was pretty much just spawned from Ruby on Rails I think) to design good websites, and I would go as to far as to say it can make better web applications than generic PHP web apps. I say this as someone who started doing PHP web development and transitioned into ASP webforms > mvc then NodeJS.
Anyway the "Why is MVC great" is another topic, but for this one the answer is.
YES WEBFORMS IS AWFUL DO NOT USE IT FOR NEW PROJECTS