Microsoft is selling it as a package deal. .NET and VS go hand in hand.
The current LTS release of .NET Core 3.1 has a broken socket implementation that can lead to deadlocks on Linux and macOS.
Microsoft will not fix it in 3.1 LTS and recommends using .NET 5, which is not an LTS. If you are a company that is deploying multiple times a day, that's probably fine. If you are a company that keeps the lights on with about 5 devs for a few hundred customers with on-prem setups, this is just unacceptable and doesn't even have anything to do with legacy libs.