Yes, many people instinctively stay away from anything microsoft (except github, typescript and npm). But the stack is solid. I’m always reminded of Stack Overflow and how they built on asp.net and like 7 servers and it scaled very well for years.
Everyone has what they like and what they’re familiar with, and for better or worse, especially for startups it’s rarely .net. But I couldn’t imagine e.g. using js instead on the back end, but that’s just me.
A VM with good FFI and structs is pretty unique and all of the tooling around .NET is excellent
F# is a sleeping giant of capability in the FP/ML space, being able to use a lot of the existing tooling
People rightfully point out how it's sort of second class in comparison to C# at times, but its still A tier tooling that few languages have