I can definitely see the appeal of a simplified .NET lacking a lot of the baggage it has from 21 years. .NET core was an attempt at stripping a lot of stuff out

I can definitely see the appeal of a simplified .NET lacking a lot of the baggage it has from 21 years. .NET core was an attempt at stripping a lot of stuff out but over time they've had to add stuff back because it turns out telling developers they have to rewrite all their code (or give up on doing things at all) is a bad idea. Node benefits from being a newer ecosystem (~2009) that started out with simpler goals, so it accumulated cruft more slowly. Ecosystems like node also deploy breaking changes more often - .NET 1.0 software can still be run on a modern Windows machine using the latest regular framework, though as of 5.0 they finally decided to kill existing .NET code (the old framework still works, 5.0 and later just use a separate one). I'm personally still writing and maintaining .NET 4.x code and some of it is working stuff I wrote in ~2005 and it has been serving me well that whole time. I have extensive experience with C++, JS, Python etc and C# is still my first choice when it comes time to solve problems (Python is a somewhat distant but still respectable 2nd place - the REPL is great.) From time to time I've been able to solve difficult problems with built-in .NET tooling - I wrote a custom compiler for a DSL from scratch entirely using built-in 4.x features and it can do hot reloading, generate debug information, allow me to set breakpoints in visual studio, etc. I simply can't get this anywhere else.