A win32 exe will run on Windows 95 through Windows 10, for the most part. You don't need .NET for that to happen.
It's a trap, in other words.
Usually with a trap, there's typically some sort of follow-through. Let's say I fell for Microsoft's .NET trap 10 years ago. What did Microsoft do, now that they trapped me?
1. Ported .NET to Linux and MacOS with .NET Core. 2. Rebranded the formerly paid-for standard edition of Visual Studio as the Community edition and gave it away for free, even for commercial use so long as your business revenue was below $1mill. 3. Completely open-sourced the .NET Core runtime, base class libraries, JIT and C#/VB.NET compilers. 4. Also open-sourced formerly closed tech like WPF, WinForms, ASP.NET.
Every new project now is just an open source project on github, like github.com/dotnet/machinelearning or example.
In a way, Microsoft still is trying to lock me into continuing to be a .NET developer - by just treating the platform and its developers really well. Gee, such a wild thought to think that maybe companies can change over time?
C# and .NET Core in particular give me the ability to deploy server or utility software on pretty much anything. You can build a completely self contained executable which is fantastic for deploying software on machines where you can't control the infrastructure.
So, sort of the opposite of lock in.