>"They chased EVERY fad that could be chased. Silverlight, UPF, XAML, WPF, Islands, MAUI"
Being a wise man I spared myself from this madness long time ago;) When I need Windows Desktop App I use Delphi or lately Lazarus that can do both Windows and Linux GUI from a single source and produce native standalone executables.
WinForms is still around, and works as well as it always did. That or WPF are still the sanest choices for desktop apps in .NET, IMO, so long as you're only targeting Windows. And WinForms specifically resembles VCL a lot.
I skipped .NET bandwagon for desktop completely. Comparatively to Delphi there were exactly zero business reasons for me to move my code or use .NET for new apps.
On a technical side there were no gains and numerous limitations.
On the technical side, the biggest productivity gain is from having a garbage collector. Beyond that, language features: while C# 1.0 started in a spot very similar to Delphi (+GC), it evolved much faster - e.g. getting generics in 2005.
But, yes, if you looked at it in 1.x days, it really looked a lot like Delphi libraries with Java-like syntax. So if you were already using Delphi, there wasn't much point.
