You make it sound like everything has to be first party (i.e. a locked-in ecosystem). I also don't agree that one is 'reaching' for anything, since as soon as

You make it sound like everything has to be first party (i.e. a locked-in ecosystem). I also don't agree that one is 'reaching' for anything, since as soon as you interact with the broader world of interconnected systems, most of the first-party Microsoft things just don't work. They are almost all designed for their own standards that are too different or have to be manipulated too much to be compatible with something else. Some things don't even exist like a basic Redis client. At that point even a highly experienced Microsoft developer has no choice but to get that non-first-party library. dotnet tries to do too much by itself and that makes it annoying to use unless you happen to be building what it wants you to build.