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Really surprised by MS. One of the bigger benefits of chosing the MS ecosystem was their sensibility when it comes to decisions like this (and long term support - in one way or another). I can understand the decision to scrap a lot of the pieces here, but especially scrapping NodeServices is a huge surprise - it's so useful (e.g. best PDF-rendering way in AspNetCore AFAIK) and facilitates all the other use cases. Perhaps the strangest decisions of them all is to continue supporting the React CLI and Angular CLI ways (without SSR). Drop that and spend that effort on maintaining NodeServices so that the foundation has good/trusted (previusly trusted) MS support - and then the community can create the different pieces on top of it (which will also make it clear which pieces are the valuable ones). In particular, I believe a generic webpack-plugin and a generic SSR (prerender) + some online tutorials/guides for how to do it with the most popular frameworks (React, Angular, Vue) would solve something like 98% of all scenarios.

I also have to say I'm surprised by their comments. Basically they're just saying: It's open source, the community should take over. To ask the community to take on a project as significant and important as this is a huge ask. To even have to consider the likelihood of it not turning up/being managed with continuous high quality (thus continuously updated and actively steered) doesn't feel good at all.

It feels like the big selling point of web devs moving to AspNetCore - a MS that really supports modern web development - is now lost (at least the trust part of it). Is it to push people towards their Blazor future? If so, that's ignorant of the status of things and how client side Blazor fundamentally has some issues (passing along a significant runtime to get started). Was it just a trick to get people to move to AspNetCore along the lines of the famous Extend-Embrace-Extinguish strategy? I thought MS got rid of that.

I used to be a big proponent of the new MS and MS as a stable ecosystem partner. Now, I lost a lot of faith in them over there.