It certainly would. The reach of .NET was artificially restricted in many respects by making it a component of Windows. Mono provided the ability to just ship the runtime alongside the app, but Mono was also not "enterprise grade"; and of course there were always the missing bits and pieces, especially on the desktop front where such deployment made most sense.

It took a Microsoft that understood open source and non-Windows platforms, and was serious about it, to ultimately get us to the point where .NET Core could be a thing.