dev on .net is something I can understand ... but deploying and running windows servers in prod sounds like a hellish nightmare
In pragmatic terms, .NET is as native as anything else in Linux at this point.
You can even build it from source: https://github.com/dotnet/dotnet
In fact, the VMR ( linked above ) ONLY works on Linux at the moment with Windows and Mac support planned. So, .NET is Linux-first in some ways.
MAUI is not Linux first of course. The rest of it is becoming more and more Linux and container focussed though it seems.