This is awfully similar to how I feel about C# the language itself really feels like "improved Java" and making side projects was a joy. But, I realized that the vast majority of companies that use .NET are not tech first, meaning developers and software is a cost center, meaning there's little to no internal engineer culture or investment to the development department, and everyone just wants to "flip the burger and move on".
Well said! I once heard C# referred to as a “blue collar language”. Perhaps snarky, but it mirrors my experience.
There’s little in the way of fun in the ecosystem. Not a lot of true open source in the conventional sense, lots of Microsoft MVP consultant types with blogs promoting their services. Those websites look like time capsules from 2011. You won’t find many beautiful, “handcrafted” blogs on .NET topics. A perhaps bizarre metric, but it helped me well in gauging an ecosystem’s vibe (Rust, Go, Python and others pass that vibe check, for example).
Part of the problem - there's highly insufficient amount of bullying in the industry towards companies and decision makers that blindly pick Go as a language for e.g. yet another database or some other form of data-intensive application rather than C# which is what they actually should be choosing if they don't want to use Rust but still something that gives them performant and robust platform for systems programming.
Which is actually my main reason why I shill it here on HN - please, stop picking Go for the fun technical challenges. It's an exceedingly poor choice for that and you are making yourself a fool with it because you never looked at platform implementation details and capabilities to make an informed choice.
The "higher level managed Rust" you are looking for has always been C# even more so in the last couple of years due to proper low-level abstractions and performance it offers.
