But if your personal projects are a stepping stone to a programming job, then .NET has a monstrous legacy problem. In 2002-2007 a lot of code was written using .NET in enterprises: it was the best way to write a rich desktop application for Windows and ASP.NET WebForms, while terrible, were an okay stack for intranet websites, certainly not worse than PHP5 without Yii or Laravel. And if you were a Microsoft shop, you got the best integration with MS SQL Server and (oh Lord) BizTalk if you used .Net.
But then Rails and Google Chrome came out and completely upended the webapp industry. Microsoft has been playing catch-up ever since.
A modern startup could certainly use .NET 6 instead of the framework of the month to write their world-shattering program, but they won't, because .NET isn't cool. A lot of .NET jobs are in stuffy enterprises where you likely won't be paid to write a backend to a Svelte SPA in .NET 6, you will be paid to maintain an ASP.NET WebForms 2.0 monster that uses WCF to talk to some SOAP/XML webservices.
Of course, the same applies to JavaEE, but Java has a second leg to stand on: people wrote FOSS in Java back when it was a dirty word at Microsoft, so not everything in Java shops is a terrible Spring/JavaEE mutant that has to be configured using vendor-specific XML.