No that's basically it. All validations, caching and logic is handled in the services, so the repositories is all about just storing and retrieving data. However, we initially built the data layer with Dapper, but since EF Core is so fast, we didn't really see any upside of handling schema creation and migrations manually.

Where have you experienced performance issues with the EF Core data layer?

Startup is the most noticeable but in my application, I have a page with an archive of recordings that will need to be searchable by several different fields (not just tags). I think good indexes and a good database architecture will be paramount to enabling fast searching.