Don’t get me wrong, my organisation has a several decade long partnership with Microsoft and they are one of our greatest business partners on the tech side, but the company hasn’t changed one bit. They’ve simply changed what is is they are selling from software licenses to cloud, and having lots and lots of easily available mostly open source tools is how they do that best.
Just look at their image transformation from evil monopoly to open source champion. But everything they do, works better if you buy their products. .Net core runs perfectly well without Azure, but it works just a tad better with things like application insights. VSC works perfectly well on Linux or OS/X, but it works just a little bit better with Azure integration or/and on Windows with WSL.
On a windows cpu with WSL, it takes like 30 seconds to recompile a simple nextjs frontend...
WSL makes 0 sense when you have unix/bash available in the OS like is the case with Linux/Mac anyways.
Maybe the azure part... But I stick to heroku/netlify/vercel anyway.
e.g. if you look at the docs presently https://code.visualstudio.com/docs , you see some signs of it already with a section dedicated to azure containing extensions dedicated to managing and deploying to parts of azure from within VSCode.