The problem is that resume driven development gets rewarded. If you run some old Cold Fusion site that works perfectly with low maintenance costs you will get no respect when a new project comes up or when changing jobs. On the other hand if you convert that Cold Fusion site to nodejs, Cassandra and 19 microservices you are valuable on the job market. Even though you have replaced something simple that works with a complex monstrosity.
That's the stupid nature of our industry. Everything is buzzword driven.
I think a lot of that is a gripe with the Windows platform itself and the "enterprisey" culture that surrounded Windows. It's pretty decent now but carries a really really ugly legacy in terms of performance, security, technical debt, and bad managers that insisted on $MS everything.
I agree with all the above points, and like to add a few more.
There's incredibly good aspects to .NET, and it was better in the past than it is now relative to the competition..
However it's been a victim of it's own success, both in attracted a lot of recent mediocre talent due to it's success, and in growing more complex in it's 15 year lifespan so far. The platform complexity has increased significantly with PCLs, .NET Core, and moving from a dependable 18 month release cycle to a fragmented multi-channel release cycle.. ostensibly to keep up with the competition, but really just getting trapped into a classic prisoners dilemma of a race to the bottom of fragmentation and dependency hell. I think they should have left that particular trick to the Javascript framework of the month ..
Another issue that holds .NET back is licensing, startups don't want to worry about the licensing in case they scale. .NET core is improving this though and there is a huge amount of open source .NET code available.
Despite these drawbacks it's still an awesome platform, with possibly the best general purpose language available in C#. But it's not cool, and yes a lot of that is cargo cult based misunderstanding of it's abilities.
That's the stupid nature of our industry. Everything is buzzword driven.