Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree that many of MS’s “open source” libraries (eg EF, OData) are half-assed, badly run projects. I’m also still mad at them for competing against amazing stuff like ServiceStack (a real OSS project from the community, and the best way to run REST APIs I’ve ever seen) with “official” but worse stuff like ASP.NET Web API. They do this a lot, some OSS gets popular but instead of embracing it, they make a half-assed…
I think .NET-s unique strength comes from its batteries-included approach, very useful in enterprise environments where every piece of software needs to be audited. That means Microsoft strives to provide a first-party library for every business case. That said, you can still use ServiceStack and Newtonsoft.JSON if you wish to.
Compared to my projects that (begrudgingly) use Node.js...