Yes, but the world of software development is radically different now. Microsoft knows that the cloud is where most of their potential for growth is and they think (correctly, in my opinion) that developer goodwill is going to be important in getting more of the cloud market share.

They aren't the biggest player right now, so their main focus is getting people to switch from a different provider (AWS) to Azure. A great way to do that is for the developers to like using Azure more than AWS.

After all, most of Microsoft's "evil years" were when they were on top, not in a distant second place.

I also think that developers have a lot more power in companies, especially smaller and newer companies, than they used.