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Are the benefits to using background workers in ASP.NET if there isn't app recycling?

Background: I have a simple ASP.NET Core 3.1 site. Very rarely (three or four times per week), a user might fill out a form that triggers an email to be sent.
I don't want to delay the page response while running the 'send email' operation (even though it only takes a second or two), so from everything I've read, it seems like the code that should handle the email should be a background worker/hosted service, and the Razor pages code should place the data object to be sent in a collection that gets monitored by the background service.
What I'm not fully understanding is why this is necessary in modern ASP.NET Core.
If I was doing this in a normal C# application (not ASP), I'd simply make the 'send email' method async (it's using MailKit, which has async methods), and call the async method without awaiting, allowing the the work be done on the threadpool while allowing the response thread to continue.
But existing answers and blog posts say that calling an async method without an await in ASP is dangerous, due to the fact that IIS can restart ASP processes (application pool recycling).
Yet, most things I've read say Application Recycling is an artifact of old ASP when memory leaks were common, and it's not really a thing on .Net Core. Additionally, many ASP applications aren't even hosted in IIS anymore.
Further, as far as I can tell, IHostedService/Background Worker objects aren't doing anything special - they don't seem to add any additional threading; they just look like singletons that have additional notification for environment startup and shutdown.
So:
Is calling a fire-and-forget async method in ASP.NET Core still considered poor practice, especially if the fire and forget task is short-lived? If so, why? [see edit below for clarification]
Other than notifications for shutdown, is there any reason why a background service is considered better than borrowing a managed threadpool thread (via Task.Run or QueueBackgroundWorkItem)? Wouldn't waking a background service (if it was awaiting on object to be placed in a collection) consume a pool thread in the same way?
Edit: I acknowledge that starting a task, and reporting success to the user, when there's a chance that operation could be terminated, is poor form. There's benefit to being notified of a shutdown and being able to finalize tasks.
Perhaps a better question is, does the old behavior of cycling still exist in modern ASP (on IIS or Kestrel)? Are there other reasons an orderly shutdown might be triggered (other than server shutdown/manual stop)?

I would still call it a poor practice.
The main concern here as well as in the referenced post is mainly about the promise of task completion.
Without being aware of the ghost background tasks, the runtime will not be able to notify the tasks to gracefully stop. This may or may not cause serious issues depending on the status of the tasks at the point the termination occurs.
Using fire forget task often means, your task is at the risk of having to start all over again when the process restarts. And sometimes this is not possible due to loss of context. Imagine your fire-forget task is calling another web API with parameters provided by a web request. The parameters are likely to get wiped out from memory if the process restarts.
And remember, the recycling is not always triggered by IIS / server. It could also be triggered by people. Say when your application runs into a memory leak issue, and you may want to recycle the app process every 1 hour as a temporary relief. Then you need to make sure you don't break your background tasks.
In terms of hosting - it is still possible to host ASP.Net Core applications in-process, in which the app pool gets recycled by IIS after a configured time period, or by default 29 hours.
In terms of lifetime - hosted services are types you register to DI, so DI features could be used, for example, this built-in hosted service implements IDisposable, which means proper clean up could be done upon shutting down.
Frankly, background tasks and hosted services both allow you to do fire and forget. But when you need reliability and resilience, hosted services win.

To answer the second half of your question, the app will wait for all hosted services' StopAsync methods to finish before shutting down. As long as you await your Tasks in the hosted service, this effectively means you can assume your Tasks will be allowed to finish running before the app shuts down. The app could still be force-shutdown, which in that case, nothing is guaranteed anymore.
If you need more guarantees about your background tasks, you should move them to run in a separate process. You could use something like Runly to make it easier to break out functionality into background jobs. It also makes it easy to provide real-time feedback to the user so that you are not lying to the user when you say "everything is done" while something is still running in the background.
Full disclosure: I cofounded Runly.

Custom Command Windows Services on HIGH Priority

I have an Work Tracker WPF application which deployed in Windows Server 2008 and this Tracker application is communicating with (Tracker)windows service VIA WCF Service.
User can create any work entry/edit/add/delete/Cancel any work entry from Worker Tracker GUI application. Internally it will send a request to the Windows service. Windows Service will get the work request and process it in multithreading. Each workrequest entry will actually create n number of work files (based on work priority) in a output folder location.
So each work request will take to complete the work addition process.
Now my question is If I cancel the currently creating work entry. I want to to stop the current windows service work in RUNTIME. The current thread which is creating output files for the work should get STOPPED. All the thread should killed. All the thread resources should get removed once the user requested for CANCEL.
My workaround:
I use Windows Service On Custom Command method to send custom values to the windows service on runtime. What I am achieving here is it is processing the current work or current thread (ie creating output files for the work item recieved).and then it is coming to custom command for cancelling the request.
Is there any way so that the Work item request should get stopped once we get the custom command.
Any work around is much appreciated.

Summary
You are essentially talking about running a task host for long running tasks, and being able to cancel those tasks. Your specific question seems to want to know the best way to implement this in .NET. Your architecture is good, although you are brave to roll your own rather than using existing frameworks, and you haven't mentioned scaling your architecture later.
My preference is for using the TPL Task object. It supports cancellation, and is easy to poll for progress, etc. You can only use this in .NET 4 onwards.
It is hard to provide code without basically designing a whole job hosting engine for you and knowing your .NET version. I have described the steps in detail below, with references to example code.
Your approach of using the Windows Service OnCustomCommand is fine, you could also use a messaging service (see below) if you have that option for client-service comms. This would be more appropriate for a scenario where you have many clients talking to a central job service, and the job service is not on the same machine as the client.
Running and cancelling tasks on threads
Before we look at your exact context, it would be good to review MSDN - Asynchronous Programming Patterns. There are three main .NET patterns to run and cancel jobs on threads, and I list them in order of preference for use:
TAP: Task-based Asynchronous Pattern
Based on Task, which has been available only since .NET 4
The prefered way to run and control any thread-based activity from .NET 4 onwards
Much simpler to implement that EAP
EAP: Event-based Asynchronous Pattern
Your only option if you don't have .NET 4 or later.
Hard to implement, but once you have understood it you can roll it out and it is very reliable to use
APM: Asynchronous Programming Model
No longer relevant unless you maintain legacy code or use old APIs.
Even with .NET 1.1 you can implement a version of EAP, so I will not cover this as you say you are implementing your own solution
The architecture
Imagine this like a REST based service.
The client submits a job, and gets returned an identifier for the job
A job engine then picks up the job when it is ready, and starts running it
If the client doesn't want the job any more, then they delete the job, using it's identifier
This way the client is completely isolated from the workings of the job engine, and the job engine can be improved over time.
The job engine
The approach is as follows:
For a submitted task, generate a universal identifier (UID) so that you can:
Identify a running task
Poll for results
Cancel the task if required
return that UID to the client
queue the job using that identifier
when you have resources
run the job by creating a Task
store the Task in a dictionary against the UID as a key
When the client wants results, they send the request with the UID and you return progress by checking against the Task that you retrieve from the dictionary. If the task is complete they can then send a request for the completed data, or in your case just go and read the completed files.
When they want to cancel they send the request with the UID, and you cancel the Task by finding it in the dictionary and telling it to cancel.
Cancelling inside a job
Inside your code you will need to regularly check your cancellation token to see if you should stop running code (see How do I abort/cancel TPL Tasks? if you are using the TAP pattern, or Albahari if you are using EAP). At that point you will exit your job processing, and your code, if designed well, should dispose of IDiposables where required, remove big strings from memory etc.
The basic premise of cancellation is that you check your cancellation token:
After a block of work that takes a long time (e.g. a call to an external API)
Inside a loop (for, foreach, do or while) that you control, you check on each iteration
Within a long block of sequential code, that might take "some time", you insert points to check on a regular basis
You need to define how quickly you need to react to a cancellation - for a windows service it should be within milliseconds, preferably, to make sure that windows doesn't have problems restarting or stopping the service.
Some people do this whole process with threads, and by terminating the thread - this is ugly and not recommended any more.
Reliability
You need to ask: what happens if your server restarts, the windows service crashes, or any other exception happens causing you to lose incomplete jobs? In this case you may want a queue architecture that is reliable in order to be able to restart jobs, or rebuild the queue of jobs you haven't started yet.
If you don't want to scale, this is simple - use a local database that the windows service stored job information in.
On submission of a job, record its details in the database
When you start a job, record that against the job record in the database
When the client collects the job, mark it for delayed garbage collection in the database, and then delete it after a set amount of time (1 hour, 1 day ...)
If your service restarts and there are "in progress jobs" then requeue them and then start your job engine again.
If you do want to scale, or your clients are on many computers, and you have a job engine "farm" of 1 or more servers, then look at using a message queue instead of directly communicating using OnCustomCommand.
Message Queues have multiple benefits. They will allow you to reliably submit jobs to a central queue that many workers can then pick up and process, and to decouple your clients and servers so you can scale out your job running services. They are used to ensure jobs are reliably submitted and processed in a highly decoupled fashion, and this can work locally or globally, but always reliably, you can even then combine it with running your windows service on cloud workers which you can dynamically scale.
Examples of technologies are MSMQ (if you want to maintain your own, or must stay inside your own firewall), or Windows Azure Service Bus (WASB) - which is cheap, and already done for you. In either case you will want to use Patterns and Best Practices for Enterprise Integration. In the case of WASB then there are many (MSDN), many (MSDN samples for BrokeredMessaging etc.), many (new Task-based API) developer resources, and NuGet packages for you to use

How often is WindowsServiceBase.Tick() called in an EWL Windows Service?

I have determined that I have some intense operations that shouldn't occur in the context of a web request in my EWL web application. I see that EWL supports running a Windows Service which will be perfect for running my intense operations in the background without tying up web request threads and forcing users to wait.
I am to the point where I need to implement void WindowsServiceBase.Tick() but I don't see how often Tick() is called. How often is Tick() called by default and is this configurable?
I also see from the source that the Windows Service sends a "health check" email before calling Tick(). What's the thinking behind this? What if I don't want my email spammed with these emails?

The code in ServiceBaseAdapter is cryptic, but looking very carefully you can see that Tick will be called ten seconds after Init completes and, from then on, ten seconds after the last Tick call completes.
The health check email will go out shortly after midnight every day. It's designed to let you know that the service is still alive.

Timer, app pool timeout

I have a timer running in my web application. Each time the application starts up, the timer is created. The issue is that the app pool ends after an idle period which also ends the timer. The next request causes the app pool to start back up and a new timer is created.
Is there anyway to keep the timer from resetting?

This is a question I see a lot. The short answer is no, the long answer is that even if you would periodically poll the web site it will eventually recycle the app pool anyway.
If need to do background work like this and embed that in ASP.NET you have to create a robust work queue that doesn't break if there are interruptions or crashes because it's going to happen. And that's just good design anyway for long running processes. This might seem like a lot of work but a simple design can take you very far.
The recommended approach is to pull that code into a separate Win32 service because the nature of such workloads don't sit well in REST based architectures.
If all you need is a periodic check, then it might be fine with just having an external script polling the web site but it's a crude way of handling timers.

Thread Aborted?

Hi,
I have a ASP.NET application where I have added a Webservice that contains a "fire and forget" method. When this method is executed it will start a loop (0-99999) and for every loop it will read a xml file and save it to the database.
The problem is that this action will take a couple of hours and it usually ends with a Thread Aborted exception?
I have seen that you can increase the executionTimeout and this is how :
<httpRuntime executionTimeout="604800"/>
<compilation debug="true">
But this does not help?
I have also tried to add a thread.sleep within the loop. If I set it to 500 it will go half way and if I set <100 it will just go a couple of 1000 loops before the thread aborted exception?
How can I solve this?

Don't run the loop inside the web service. Instead, have it in a console app, a winforms app, or possibly even a windows service. Use the web service to start up the other program.
A web service is basically a web page, and asp.net web pages are not meant to host long running processes.
This article does not directly answer your question, but contains a snippet of info relevant to my answer:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/dd296718.aspx
However, when the duration of the
operation grows longer than the
typical ASP.NET session duration (20
minutes) or requires multiple actors
(as in my hiring example), ASP.NET
does not offer sufficient support. You
may recall that the ASP.NET worker
processes automatically shut down on
idle and periodically recycle
themselves. This will cause big
problems for long-running operations,
as state held within those processes
will be lost.
and the article is a good read, at any rate. It may offer ideas for you.

Not sure if this is 'the answer', but when you receive the web service call you could consider dispatching the action onto another thread. That could then run until completion. You would want to consider how you ensure that someone doesn't kick off two of these processes simultaneously though.

I have a ASP.NET application where I
have added a Webservice that contains
a "fire and forget" method. When this
method is executed it will start a
loop (0-99999) and for every loop it
will read a xml file and save it to
the database.
Lets not go into that I fhind this approach quite... hm... bad for many reasons (like a mid of the thing reset). I would queue the request, then return, and have a queue listener do the processing with transactional integrity.
Anyhow, what you CAN do is:
Queue a WorkItem for a wpool thread to pick things up.
Return immediately.
Besides that, web services and stuff like this are not a good place for hourly long running processes. Tick off a workflow, handle it separately.