In my opinion, DTOs are yet another code smell

Code Smell 40 — DTOs

derived from thinking objects as anemic data repositories.

If you need to transfer ‘data’ use ‘data’

You have primitive arrays, jsons, strings, etc.

If you create one anemic DTO object for every real object you will pollute your namespace, have duplication etc.

You are not transfering objects. you are transferring ‘data’