That's a basic example with a single level of generics too, you'd sometimes have to do things like:

    Dictionary<string, List<Tuple<string, string>>> foo = new Dictionary<string, List<Tuple<string, string>>> 

Or things like:

    Dictionary<string, List<Tuple<string, string>>> foo = DoSomeWork();

And you'd have to get the type right, even though the compiler knew the type, because it'd tell you off for getting it wrong. Sometimes it was easiest to just grab the type from the compiler error. ( This example is of course a bit OTT, and it's a bit of a code-smell to be exposing that detail of typing to consumers. )

No-one wants to go back to that, and anyone who says C# is over-complicated I think is forgetting how rough it was in the earliest versions.

While introduction of auto-typing through "var" helped a lot with that, you'd still regularly have to fight if you wanted to properly initialise arrays with values, because the syntax was just not always obvious.

Collection literals are amazing, and now the ability to pass things into the constructor means they can be used when you need constructor parameters too, that's just a good thing as you say.