Yes, we tried this before.

Our client wanted an Episerver solution where public content is created by editors and fetched from Episerver, and "closed content" section where data is fetched from 3rd party systems while header, footer, news feeds, etc. must be the same on both sections.

Instead of creating 40+ "empty" page types, we used standard MVC controllers. You still have access to IContentLoader and other Epi stuff which allows you to fetch and display Episerver content on non-episerver pages.

Just remember that you need to take care of security yourself when using custom routing (that you need to do with ordinary pages).

Here you can see how I use it inside Epi, but it could be as public view pages as well

https://world.episerver.com/blogs/Henrik-Fransas/Dates/2016/11/extending-the-episerver-editor-interface/