While maybe that's true, that doesn't map to my experience very well. After QBasic, I wrote a lot of Visual Basic 5 and 6. I had poked at C, but would not say I knew it, and had never done anything useful in the language. But I did exactly one thing in VB.NET before trying C# and realizing that it really did encapsulate and present a better way to think about code. It's not perfect, but it's much, much better--and in that era, .NET 2 or so, it was significantly more ergonomic and had better tooling than Java or PHP, the other two languages I learned about contemporaneously with C#.

Maybe there's a mass cohort of people who were simply not going to learn something new, but in the light of most of twenty years hence, I think that they made the right call.