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.
I tried .NET and liked C# as a language. But even though the language and runtime are now open source, it seemed like a lot of the recommended libraries were still commercially licensed, which was an immediate nope from me. I've never encountered that in any other ecosystem.
And in 20 years I've personally never needed a paid library. Maybe one company had bought Telerik back in the day? I've now built up multiple startups, some with millions of users.
The only thing I ever plugin that's not a MS library really are serilog, validation with FluentValidation, and a job server, usually Hangfire just because it's easy. Other than that, most people have good C# API clients. Oh and OAuth, though the popular one got baited and switched like you said.
The key difference is that the core libraries cover much more for .Net than most other languages. I'm constantly adding npm modules, but rarely nuget packages.
But the opensource/closed source bait and switch has happened a lot recently it does seem. Someone was blaming it on some failure of an open source initiative MS were running.
But one of the big frustrations sometimes is dealing with some American Koolaid company who thinks Erlang support is a priority but .Net isn't. No code examples, no officially supported library. Most recent example, IBM of all people (C-level insisting we use their cloud, ugh).