I think a main reason Microsoft lost their development community is because they charged for access to Visual studio (which is the gateway to the entire ecosystem). People didn't talk about it openly, because no one was building for the microsoft platform outside of work.
Meanwhile a whole community of competing free alternatives appeared - students learnt Java and Python because C# was a paid product that was also not cross platform.
Meanwhile a whole community of competing free alternatives appeared - students learnt Java and Python because C# was a paid product that was also not cross platform.