Kind of, us users of .NET would have liked a Delphi, VB 6 kind of attention to performance, however for many years, Microsoft management had exactly that attitude, expecting that anyone that cared about performance would be writting COM in C++, or DLLs, and consuming those artifacts from .NET.

Finally they changed their approach to .NET, besides Midori, SFI that I mention on a sibling comment, certainly also due to Go and Rust competition.

Note how Azure nowadays does most of their open source contributions in Go and Rust, the rewrites that completly ignored .NET, while the team mentions lack of adoption on .NET related podcasts.

They had a few 'squirrel' moments.

Silverlight comes to mind, Also the fever dream that was '.NET micro'. I might still have my NetDuino somewhere...

> the main target audience of C#/.NET has always been LOB CRUD app shops.

I do think this has changed over time. There's definitely been improvements to the overall ecosystem from game developers (Cysharp being the most prolific) via both libraries and feedback around the BCL/JIT/etc.