But really, VB.NET was the use case for your last paragraph. It's syntax is far closer to VB6 and it has a bunch of tricks in the language to make it easier for VB6/VBA devs to transition.
In my (personal) observations, you would see a lot of VB.NET stuff before LINQ was a thing. As that took off, a lot of shops (including one I worked at) saw that writing such was far less verbose in C# than VB.NET (Really, once you get into anonymous functions is where VB's verboseness becomes a huge liability and really makes readability a problem.)
tl;dr - Since VS 2008 C# has been growing steadily in popularity due to the number of features it has genuinely focused on making it easy to develop 'midrange' (i.e. not python/ruby slow, but not go/rust fast necessarily) code