100% this is how my company used to deploy. we had multiple servers. rsync'd code to each server and cycled IIS. Worked good. Deploys to our farm took just a minute or two, because it would do a double deploy just to be extra sure everything went out.
Then the BORG came and assimilated us. Our deploys take easily 45+ minutes to really start shifting traffic
Kestrel does ASP.Net very quickly, because that's all it does. If you want a full web server, that does things like static files, SSL, Reverse Proxying, etc. then you want IIS at the very least sitting in front of it.
Then the BORG came and assimilated us. Our deploys take easily 45+ minutes to really start shifting traffic