[addicted]

This is almost entirely wrong.

.Net is not even close to being driven by Microsoft’s internal needs, for the simple reason that their biggest internal products don’t use .Net.

.Net is far closer to Sun with Java or Kotlin with Jetbrains than Apple with Swift.

[pjmlp]

That is mostly caused by the internal politics that .NET belongs to DevDiv while C++ has always been part of WinDev.

Back in the early Windows days it was C and C++, then VB came along and it was VB for business while real developers used C++/MFC.

With .NET management tried to create an homogenous runtime, hence why it even supported Managed C++ (replaced with C++/CLI on .NET 2.0).

But they made an huge mistake that persists to this day, splitting the languages across these divisions, thus fuelling their feudal politics.