Northern Europe runs on C# and .Net. I am not joking. There are more C# jobs in Denmark than Python, Node.js, Ruby, and PHP jobs combined.
I personally hated working with Visual Studio 2017. 2019 was an improvement, but one so small it was still awful. I recently used it again (2021?) and was cynically surprised that they FINALLY got scrolling that isn't forcibly line-based. Why did they even bother now?
This and some other small things that used to make the experience painful are now solved, but they still haven't really gotten on top of the freezes and crashes.
Visual Studio being bad is one thing, it being the only officially supported IDE is the other. They should not only officially support third party efforts like Jetbrains Rider, in the past I've gone as far as saying they should discontinue Visual Studio in favor of it.
Now for the nice part: Almost all "new .NET" announcements/tutorials focus on VS Code, an IDE that sucks a whole lot less.
On another note: Transforming a 20 line T4 template took 4-5x as long as the actual compilation on the last .Net project I've seen.
Yeah it's big and takes some big chunk of resources, but that has never been a problem in my daily work.
What I mean is that I found it very hard to find "interesting" stuff built with it. You get the official documentation and that's it - for .Net Framework, anyway. Few blog posts about issues and their solutions, cool demonstrations or just general musings. It's like people don't care. And maybe they don't - it's just their job, after all, and they can't wait to go home to their wives and kids rather than think about some technology more than they have to.
As a newcomer (forced through an apprenticeship) who does think about technology more than he has to I found this bewildering and demotivating.
Microsoft seems to have realized this and seems to have put a reasonable amount of effort into building a community around the new .Net and making it seem exciting/interesting rather than something that's just in a really slow death spiral. Oh, and building things that one can easily get excited about. Non-nullable types come to mind.