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.
There are plenty of real issues that are not the enterprise stigma.
I built a backend web api this year with it and C# is fantastic. EF Core is truly one of the best ORMs I've ever used. That said, I regret that decision and won't be using it again for any new projects.
Honestly it looks like Microsoft is distracted and doesn't really know what to do with .NET. Everywhere you look there are tons of half baked projects like Blazor, Identity or Kiota and progress in .NET is super slow. It's probably going to get worse now with all the AI crap.
I don't think Microsoft doesn't know what to do with .NET. I think it continues on a very logical and direct path. But they have no idea what to do with UI on any platform. Luckily they haven't even deprecated any of the existing options and on the web, at least, you have all the same options as every other platform.
While Blazor has some cool stuff built in, the cool stuff never felt worth the risk of building a product around it.
There is a market for front-end development that isn't steeped in the hell of actual front-end development. Blazor is almost the right idea but I think this incarnation is a dead end. Somebody needs to gather up all the pieces and figure it out for real.