Not everything Microsoft has produced is terrible, but for a while there it seemed all developers I knew couldn't see past the brand even if the tooling/products/ideas were solid. I feel it's gotten better since Nadella took the reins, but the smell still seem to linger sometimes.
Time to go snow skiing in hell, I guess. It's deeply frozen over.
If Microsoft provided a Developer's Edition of Windows -- without telemetry and ads -- that also came with access to a knowledge-base of best practices for Windows-based software, and why you want to use each major Windows component, for a flat, one-time fee, I'd strongly consider building things for that environment.
I feel like Microsoft's current approach of buying their way under the free software world via GitHub is kinda scummy, and all that code's now under Copilot and other LLMs. If they were a bit more upstanding and had a clean, mutually respectful business model, I might consider buying their products.
In the mean time, I'd rather use something written by a random hacker, because I can at least read their code, or even hit them up and have a conversation about their project.
React didn't get much adoption initially and FB didn't spend money on marketing their framework, like Google did with Angular. Developers started using React to speed-up table rendering in Angular application, and only after some performance-related blogposts adoption started to grow.
Like angular, react got the huge initial boost in popularity because of the brand behind it.