[mindcrime]

Just to set the stage for my answer, let me say this: I generally dislike Microsoft and have for decades. I'm an old-skool OSS guy who has been running Linux as my main desktop OS since about 2000 (and on servers before that), tries very hard to run only OSS software in general, and still can't help but see MS as the "evil empire". So I am pre-disposed to take a negative view of MS and anything they do.

That said... I would not say that Azure is a dead-end at all. The rest of the MS dev stack, I am less sure about. But Azure as a cloud provider seems to be pretty much neck and neck with AWS, and I've seen plenty of evidence of big companies continuing to invest more and more into Azure migrations.

I haven't done any scientific comparison or anything, but from where I sit (live/work in a major tech area in the Southeast US) I get the vibe that Azure is pretty popular and will continue to be for the foreseeable future. Note however, I don't intend to suggest that using Azure means anything about using any other MS tech. Most of what I see is people running Java based apps in containers on AKS backed by Linux instances.

YMMV, HTH, ETC.