When building my application which consists of 10 lines of code and has dependency to Zeroconf & Newtonsoft.json, it produces around 104 dlls in my bin release directoy
This is a .net standard 2.0/net 4.6/4.7.1 issue which was improved in 4.7.2:
"In .NET Framework 4.7.2 we have addresses the known runtime issues with .NET Standard 2.0. We made changes to the runtime to ensure that you don’t need additional files deployed along with your .NET Standard library"
So, run Visual Studio 2017 Installer and install .Net Framework 4.7.2 and the Target Pack and target your app as .net 4.7.2.