I was a long time net dev (going back to 2001) who has since moved onto a lot of other things, including nodejs. However, I did take a long break from nodejs for about 2 years, and in my new position it is used heavily.
I used to be pretty excited about node. It’s stupidly cheap to get started and deploy anywhere, using one language for front and backend can be a boon for teams that mix junior talent or folks that just want to reduce complexity and maximize reuse, has a low barrier to entry and wide open community, and was surprisingly scrappy in concurrency, pound for pound.
Coming back to node, I’m fucking miserable, to be honest. The headless community has actually become a liability, where the lack of built-in solutions for essential tasks–particularly the toolchain– has led to something worse than design-by-committee, more akin to design-by-vibes or meme, because the core group is painfully behind the needs of the community and tends to fracture (see bun, demo, etc) rather than evolve. We can’t even decide on a god damned package manager, and all of them are a dumpster fire. Meanwhile your project’s dependency tree is a katamari ball of potential supply chain vectors or abandonware, and all you’ve done is fucking boilerplate a project! Which by the way, will break sometime in the near future and require you to painfully hand roll it back up or go through the expensive and arduous task of replacing.
So, about dotnet. I think the toolchain is good. The core libraries get you most of the way there. You can run it inexpensively almost anywhere these days. C# isn’t perfect but it’s a damned good OOP language. You can squeeze a lot of performance out of it, but even the default, basic approaches will get you far. I worry about the ecosystem as I’m not sure it’s as competitive or desirable as the competition, and I don’t feel great about Microsoft either. But my team expressed interest in dumping node for it and I would take it in a heartbeat.