Theoretically true, maybe not in practice.
To me ASP means coding server-side C# which implements page responses. The C# fetches data from a database – probably SQL – and renders that to HTML.
Whereas something like the MEAN stack is closer to nothing on the server – instead I think you:
- Define what the page data is – in an abstract/convenient form (like just a TypeScript interface definition)
- Define a REST API which is to GET that data e.g. as JSON
- Render that data into the DOM (using Angular or React)
In theory the two solutions could use the same database, in practice people tend to use different technology stacks.
In the former case (ASP+SQL) there’s Object-relational impedance mismatch which people try to hide using ORMs. A theoretical benefit is getting ACID “for free” – but, might pay more at run-time for hosting a database, and you might have to be real careful about caching and transaction concurrency.
In the latter case the server might be as thin as possible – an out-of-the-box web server which implements the routes by delegating to a data layer like MongoDB which more-or-less directly supports JSON I/O.