They were recovering from all of the security fiascos of software that wasn’t being updated. So they pushed as much as they could into the core libraries and forced only one version to be installed at a time- so they could easily push security fixes.
This led to one of the trickiest things for early .NET consumer apps- getting the latest runtime installed.
This led to one of the trickiest things for early .NET consumer apps- getting the latest runtime installed.