I’d also add Microsoft’s hostility to open source back then was a factor: they told you that real developers used things like Visual Source Safe, which were expensive and terrible. VSS had global file locking - literally people yelling over cube walls “who’s working on <file>?” - and was slow and unsafe (the only VCS I’ve ever seen lose data irrecoverably). Needing to run the servers wasn’t something the average developer wanted to do, either.

That doesn’t excuse not using version control but after working at a couple of Microsoft shops I understood why some people stuck with the “period zip file” approach 10-20 years later than the Unix world.