One thing that really sucked about using the original .NET was that even using something like Elastic Beanstalk on AWS, your costs were basically 4 times what .

One thing that really sucked about using the original .NET was that even using something like Elastic Beanstalk on AWS, your costs were basically 4 times what .NET Core is, with all the downsides of managing a Windows server (shudder). Core is a complete contrast. For a fairly boring CRUD web service, entity framework is a genuinely good O-R mapper and deploying .net core web services in a container is so easy it's literally childs play with the AWS toolkit installed in visual studio. I get it that a lot of developers just don't think it's cool enough and that it carries a lot of the same dependency hell as Node (well, it's better than Node for that) but for my use case it's trouble free and allows a single person shop to quickly update and deploy an entire backend system without having to manage servers or licenses or anything. Microsoft do get money out of me via the Visual Studio subscription, but I needed that for other reasons so I figure it's a sunk cost.