Re: "Visual Studio is a paid-for product"
VS Code works just fine for enterprise polyglot development; it just doesn’t hold your hand.
4 publicly visible posts • joined 23 Jan 2020
The young devs are all using VS Code, whether with .NET or not, and slowly being indoctrinated into the Way of Things. Either that or they will learn to hate hitching their ride to FOSS and having to figure stuff out all over again every time they switch jobs, or every two years, whichever comes first. While giants like Apple, Oracle, Google, etc. do cancel projects, it’s much less likely than with independent devs.
"lots of stuff"
"worse than DLL hell"
"Try installing [some obscure, important-to-me software]"
I think the hyperbolic, rhetorical, and anecdotal evidence taints your argument.
"there isn't much point"
The point to .NET is efficiency in the cloud without being tied to Windows, which translates into real money in your pocket.
It's true that Microsoft has shifted away from Windows being a dependency for their other big (paid-for) products, including SQL Server and Office. Despite that, it's the best desktop OS by many different measures, even if the choice of supported apps is driven by usage metrics.