At my last job we had two teams, one had a .NET stack, and the other had a Java EE stack, it was almost like someone had set up a lab to test which one was better (both were required to deliver very similar style LOB applications, one for one department and the other for another).
The .NET team consistently delivered a lot more value faster, and the Java deliverables always had reliability problems which they attributed to the JBoss setup. To be fair, the Java side was hampered by an "old-school" architect who refused to use the right tools for the job (even on the Java side, there are pretty decent frameworks and IDEs).
Anyway, I agree that operationally .NET has struggled, and of course the community was much different than other open source solutions, but it both have gotten much, much better in just the last few years.
Websphere is such a pain to use, yet it still is everywhere on enterprise projects.
It is the typical enterprise software suitable to sell consulting experience in what concerns configuration and management.
Endless list of configuration options, some of them only available via scripting and best of all IBM J9 specific features.
One of the issues we once had around 2006 was that our entity beans stubs would only work properly if compiled via J9.
All that said, .NET Core is a huge win on the operational side of things, so it's definitely moving in the right direction.