Necrons have, for a long time, been known as a shooting army. Last edition, we had exactly one good assault unit - the Wraith. Scarabs were ok, but Lychguard and Praetorians were way overpriced and Flayed ones, as noted previously, were just plain bad. But now? Now Necrons are possibly even better at Assault then they are at shooting.
Why?
Well, a few reasons. We lots a lot of our good specialist shooting weapons when Harbingers were taken out. Our spammed vehicles (Night Scythes and Barges) got nerfed, and are less used now.
Meanwhile, every Assault unit in the book got better. Even the Wraith, which didn't particularly need it in the first place. Only the Scarab got "nerfed", and I'm pretty sure it was mostly a sidegrade since the auto-glance attacks make them surprisingly amazing at stripping Knights to size. They're still quite good, especially with some Spyder backup to keep them healthy.
A big thing that helps Assault units now is the durability granted by the new RP and the Decurion. Marching things up the table is no longer as scary as before. I regularly footslog my Orikanstar across the board, basically nothing can stop them, same with Wraiths. Flayed Ones sitting in Cover are tougher than Marines point for point by a long shot, and you can take a lot of them. Even without Drop Pods or Invisibility on our side, our Assault units have a good chance of getting to the fight without dying.
Maelstrom as well adds to this. You need to have a lot more board presence, and while our shooting units feel just fine in the midfield, once two armies start to come together on midfield objectives, Assault is nearly inevitable. Having good Assault options isn't a bad thing when your opponent might also have to get to that same objective. In fact, I think Maelstrom Objectives brought back Assault in ways that people haven't quite realized yet.
And of course, the meta. If you play competitively or regularly play against people that like to "netlist" or "tryhard" (however you want to take those terms), you're aware of what the big movers and shakers are when it comes to the metagame. I'm talking, of course, about things like Deathstars. Plague Drone Star, Thunderwolf Calvary, Screamerstar, Bikestar, even CSM gets in on the fun with their Juggerherald. If you see anything like that with any sort of regularity, having a good Assault option is paramount to intercepting and destroying it. Flayed Ones do so cheaply, and Shieldguard do so by tying them up and carting around scary characters.
Take all of this together, you realize that Assault is more prominent in 7th ed and our Assault units got better and cheaper while we freed up some points from shooting units. Easy to see why Assaultcrons are a thing!
So, how do we do it?
I mean, obviously we still have a lot of shooting in our army. Troops are all shooting focused (and quite good), Destroyers and Tomb Blades are amazing now, and our vehicles are still pretty good if you go AV13 Wall. But, a lot of our units are Assault based. In fact, out of 36 (28 if you don't count vehicles) unit choices in the book, 17 at least in some way want to be in Assault. That's a good chunk, more than half of the non-vehicle units in the book!
Additionally, many of those Assault choices also do things outside of combat as well. Praetorians, C'tan, and CCBs have shooting attacks (as can Wraiths with upgrades). HQs usually bring other things to the units they're with, like a DLord granting PE to his Warrior unit or Obyron teleporting things around. Spyders can build more Scarabs or bring their nifty wargear. So even without getting to Assault, most of these things can contribute in some way or another quite easily.
The key is to use your shooting and Assault to complement one another. We're not Daemons, who basically have nothing but Assault. We're not Tau with gunlines that never want to engage. You have to use both to make the other stronger.
I keep going back to Lychguard, but it's because they're so good and versatile that it's hard not to point to them as a prime example. Using Shield Lychguard (with Orikan, hopefully) as a front line means that the opponent either has to deal with them, or they create a zone that no one will voluntarily walk in. You can use this to provide what is basically mobile cover for your shooting units. If they focus fire your shooters, not only are your Lychguard getting closer, but they're also giving mobile cover to your firebase.
Flayed Ones do something similar. Infiltrating one or two 10 man units of Flayed Ones creates a situation that your opponent has to respond to. Either they kill the FOs before they can charge, which lets the rest of your army get into position, or they fire on your shooters and the FOs get to rampage as they do.
Necrons on the whole don't have a lot of huge range shooting. Heavy Destroyers and Doomsday Arks are our "long range firepower", but even Heavies are only 36". Our army likes to operate in the 12"-24" range, which lends itself to mixing Assault with shooting. With our durability and units being what they are, I am of the opinion that the Necron army is designed to be a mix of Assault and Shooting, but can lean even heavier on the Assault side than most armies out there.
Every slot other than Troops has at least one Assault-capable unit, and most of them are pretty good. It's possible to even make a completely Assault army with only Warriors or Immortals camping objectives on your side of the board.
The only downside to this is that most Assault models are expensive, with the exception of Flayed Ones. They're well worth their points, of course - Shieldguard will take a stupid amount of fire and kill nearly anything in assault, as will Wraiths, and Praetorians can tear apart nearly anything that doesn't have at-initiative Power Weapons. But, it's very easy to make an Assault focused army only for it to suddenly become as small as a Grey Knights army.
And while that's not necessarily a bad thing (I'd pit Orikanstar, a Conclave, or a Flayed One blob against Grey Knights any day of the week), just keep in mind that a small army can't control as much board space as MSU or one with enough bodies to cover all objectives.
So what was the point of all this rambling?
Well... I kind of lost it at some point haha. Basically, long story short, you have to change your perception of Necrons compared to what they were in the last edition. Last time around, Assault was a joke unless you were talking about Wraiths, Destroyer Lords, or (for a time) Catacomb Command Barges. Now, you can easily look at nearly half the units in the book and throw them into assault with impunity.
Heck, with Relentless in the Decurion, Warriors and Gauss Immortals are pound for pound a pretty decent Assault choice against anything that's not a dedicated close combat unit. Rapid Firing and then charging when you can't really die to most things is a boon, and Warriors/Immortals are actually great against things like Tactical Marines or other generic Troops.
So yeah. No longer do our immortal space robot skeletons fear a fight, but in fact we are now the ones that people will run away from if they see us charging. And that feels good.
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