Having things modular have a myriad of benefits, fitting the cloud being just one of them.
Making things modular is good design in my book way before the term "cloud" even existed.
Modular things also have drawbacks. They need to be versioned, deployment is a lot more complicated, etc.
I feel that in the case of .NET Core claiming that the changes were cloud-focused is valid. After all, .NET was already in place and Microsoft didn't really need to make it that modular. It did do it and it spent a lot of resources doing it, in order to follow its cloud strategy.
I feel that in the case of .NET Core claiming that the changes were cloud-focused is valid. After all, .NET was already in place and Microsoft didn't really need to make it that modular. It did do it and it spent a lot of resources doing it, in order to follow its cloud strategy.