1000% Agree with everything said here.
Microsoft makes is stupid easy to use Azure, but that doesn't preclude how easy it is to use other hosting. It's like, you can have an iPhone and a windows laptop, but it doesn't integrate AS well as iPhone and a Mac.
Also Azure isn't really necessary at all considering the ubiquity of Docker and Kubernetes. I've been running .NET programs basically everywhere else other than Azure for a long time.