But why can't you fork it and take it in the direction you want? The situation is literally no different from Python or Node or Ruby, the people running the most popular distribution could take it in a direction you don't like and the power you have (or the only option you have) is forking.

The development for a language like python happens entirely in public though, and is driven by consensus.

https://github.com/dotnet/csharplang - "The official repo for the design of the C# programming language" that's in public.

Infront of the public, yes, but it says you need to be invited by someone from their team to participate yourself, compare that with the python process.

There's a distinction to be made between doing something in public and something being done by the public.

For .Net, there's an established pattern of careless deprecation that produced enough frameworks to date codebases like tree rings:

  - this year's correct way to access your database is...
  - this year's correct way to serve dynamic web pages is...
  - this year's correct way to make a Windows GUI is...

This pattern exists in all languages. I’d argue more so in fragmented community driven projects/languages/tools.

Except in the case of languages/tools like python, node, neovim etc. Everytime I touch one of these there is always a new better way of accessing DBs, making a web server, making a client side render, no a server side render, async library, configuration system, build system, runtime, GUI patterns etc.

There is a marked difference between a third party releasing some new library and obtaining (to some extent, demanding) community mindshare, without taking away anything, and the official platform maintainer suddenly replacing practically mandatory parts of what is perceived as the standard library. Javascript churn is fast, .Net churn is deep.

That's not really true. .NET Framework is still around. Even .NET core 3.x which is EOL a while ago, is still widely used with active stackoverflow and if you're loud enough with the .NET team at Microsoft they will help you there too.

The only difference I see between both is that there is an authoritative opinion when it comes to .NET (Microsoft) while there is no authority figure when it comes to node/Javascript. Even the actual runtime, package manager, module resolution, build tools etc get forked and replaced but since there is no authority, everyone is like "lets wait and see who wins". While with a language like .NET (or Go for that matter) you know that whatever comes from Microsoft (or Google) is the authoritative answer and people are more likely to jump to it right away.

The "authoritative opinion" is indecisive. Microsoft frameworks tend to be high quality, but there are too many. ASP? ASP.Net? ASP.Net Core? ASP.Net MVC? Razor? Blazor?

Well, you’re covering about 23 years of development there between ASP and ASP.NET Core.

Don’t get me wrong, the naming sucks. Microsoft is far more likely to recycle names for marketing reasons than just introduce a new name for plethora of stupid reasons.

But Active Server Pages means nothing anymore. It stopped meaning anything since 2003 but they use it as a brand name than anything. It’s no less stupid than gulp, bower, webpack, bun, deno, express, koa, next, vite, etc.

yet they still support it all. also, you dont want them to stick to some old tech. you want them to evolve and take the best from industry. imho, they are doing just that and they are very good at it.