We were even able to downgrade our cloud servers to smaller instances, literally.
I wish .NET was more popular among startups, if only C# could get rid of the "enterpisey" stigma.
What do you mean?
1. Process, process, and more process. Doing anything required layers of management approval. Trivial tasks become month long, or even years long, processes.
2. You have no power or agency. Something is broken? You're a developer, you should be able to fix it right? No. Broken things stay broken. You swim in your lane and keep your head down. Mediocrity is the goal.
3. Optimization doesn't exist. If a process is manual and takes you, a developer, 10 hours, then that's what it is. Nobody gives a flying fuck about tooling. Nobody cares if you spend 50% of your dev time doing random stuff. And if you even dare try to fix it, you will be told it's impossible and you're wasting your time.
4. Management is king. You will have to lie to them. You will have to spend time re-entering the same data in 5 different places so they can read it conveniently. You will have to make Excel workbooks. You will have to dumb things down, and then dumb them down again, and again. Everything is about Jira... Unless they're a really high up manager, in which case you have to take whatever is in Jira and put it in a word doc and send it to them, because they don't know how to open Jira.
The fact that large companies pick an established tech over newer ones isn't about .NET/C# per se, it's about large companies and the way they work.
Working there you aren't building the next Google, you're probably maintaining a some 20 year old order-to-cash ERP process that's boring, but critically important to the business, and is exactly the software you don't want to move fast and break.
Just don't go work for big enterprises if you don't want that environment. It won't matter what language/tech stack, it's just big non-tech company things.
But there's plenty of us out there that don't mind those jobs. Pay can be good enough, and usually offer great work-life balance. I work IT ops for one. I'm remote, I put in my 9 to 5 and I'm done. I'm (thankfully) not on call, I get unlimited PTO, and my personal time is 100% my own to go do non tech things with.
Oh absolutely. It's a business decision. It just so happens that it's framework that has been around awhile and has a decent bit of support. Give Node another 10 years and that landscape might start to change.