No, you are not alone.for non-tech population, it may make sense that .NET 5 is continuation of .NET 4. But the tech crowd knows .net 5 is to .net 4 is what angular 2 is to angular 1.
With .net 4 still in active use, the naming makes it harder
With .net 4 still in active use, the naming makes it harder
Microsoft has historically been pretty bad at naming stuff (sometimes hilariously so, see Microsoft PlaysForSure[1] for an example - spoiler: it surely didn't play for long).
The rebranding from .NET Core 3.1 to .NET 5, and from .NET 4.x to .NET Framework, did make sense to me though - and increasingly so as development continues on ".NET > 5" with yearly releases, while ".NET Framework 4.x" is in maintenance mode.
[0]:https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/core/whats-new/dotn...
in my opinion, they should have kept "core" branding, but shortened it to ".NET" for marketing and only for marketing.
in a better world, Microsoft would ditch the name ".NET" altogether and invent a new one. like LVM (lightweight virtual machine)
While it was always called .NET Framework, it was very commonly referred to simply as .NET (e.g. .NET 4.5) - and the "Microsoft .NET" logo was widely used in .NET Framework branding/marketing.