You can infer direction from observable actions, and Microsoft is visibly going for dev mindshare with e.g. Typescript and VS Code. They recognise that they lost the battle for the dev desktop and the server OS, hence the pivot to xplat.
You can code in strictly vim or JetBrains with no friction, and run on mono with no friction in the happy case. It is possible for the SDK to be the only Microsoft product in your stack.
I don't see a way for Microsoft to return to funnelling users to their own ecosystem via dev-ex, and they seem to recognise that.
Potentially viewable as better than OpenJDK and Oracle (and OracleJDK) from what I've seen. A lot of .NET governance moved to the Dotnet Foundation which is built along the lines of things like the Linux Foundation. Microsoft is the major contributor to .NET and a major sponsor of the Dotnet Foundation, but most of their contributions are still flow through the Foundation legal/governance structure and subject to the same governance as anyone else today. .NET is almost entirely planned and developed openly on GitHub including things like meeting minutes for all in person meetings.
You can code in strictly vim or JetBrains with no friction, and run on mono with no friction in the happy case. It is possible for the SDK to be the only Microsoft product in your stack.
I don't see a way for Microsoft to return to funnelling users to their own ecosystem via dev-ex, and they seem to recognise that.