It started that way but wasn’t been for a while. In fact the last version was a rewrite using native macOS controls and optimized for Apple Silicon. Sad to see it go but heard great things about Rider for c# development.

The newer mac version was actually showing huge promise. It was a couple of versions away from being a great choice as primary IDE. That said, I do understand why they axed it. The market would have been tiny for all that investment.

Shortly after the team managed to ship the 1.0 release of the rewrite, what a reward.

to be fair, I heard the team all got canned at the same time.

Yes, that is what it was.

Microsoft had continued to evolve it. And a few components from Visual Studio Windows were ported over to be common. But Visual Studio Mac was 100% rebranded Xamarin Studio which of course was just an evolution of MonoDevelop.