Mimic MsBuild Copy with excluded files

I am trying to get away from using MsBuild scrips in my CD pipeline and I am having trouble replicating a specific target from my MsBuild script.

Here is the operation that I would like to perform in Powershell…
(gist since msbuild xml does not display here)

With this being the content of source
C:\staging\source\bin
C:\staging\source\content
C:\staging\source\config.xml
C:\staging\source\test.js
C:\staging\source\bin\release
C:\staging\source\bin\file1.txt
C:\staging\source\bin\file2.xml
C:\staging\source\bin\release\file3.cs
C:\staging\source\bin\release\file4.xml
C:\staging\source\content\page1.txt
C:\staging\source\content\page2.txt

The result in the destination folder should be this
C:\staging\destination\content
C:\staging\destination\content\page1.txt
C:\staging\destination\content\page2.txt

My first attempt was to use Get-ChildItem and Where-Object -notin but that was very slow and didn’t give me the same result as my MsBuild target.

$exclude = Get-Content "C:\staging\.exclude"

$dest = "C:\staging\destination"
$source = "C:\staging\source"

$paths = $exclude | select @{Name = "FullExcludePath" ; Expression = { $source+$_ } }

$itemsToExclude = $paths | foreach-object { gci $_.FullExcludePath -Recurse } 

gci $source -Recurse | Where-Object { $_ -notin $itemsToExclude } 

My robocopy attempt… (still didn’t give me expected result)

$exclude = Get-Content "C:\staging\.exclude"

$dest = "C:\staging\destination"
$source = "C:\staging\source"

$paths = $exclude | select @{Name = "FullExcludePath" ; Expression = { $source+$_ } }

robocopy $source $dest "/s" "/xf" $paths

the content of .exclude is

\*.*
\bin\**\*.*

The actual source folder is only 200mB but there are thousands of nested files and folders. I suspect this is why my Get-ChildItem was so slow.

Any help here would be greatly appreciated.

-T