in both cases, it was teams/users within Microsoft and not Microsoft itself, was it not?

Dunno, I'm glad there are teams looking at things outside of Microsoft developed technologies. NodeJS receiving kudos for being so good at serving requests lead to articles about how it could be done in ASP.NET (with some rearchitecting of the ready bake application code) which apparently gave way to ASP.NET Core and I'd say if all of that is true, we're all better for it (ASP.NET developers, anyway).