I am not sure what the stats are but I am certain they left behind a huge number of projects. Probably a population that won't be very vocal on HN but that doesn't mean they don't exist.

Even for new projects there are problems I run into that force me to use 4.8. Like if you build an Excel formula, the mandatory async/await approach just doesn't work. It's not an asynchronous operation and runs into a UI context where you deadlock if you wait. They also broke a lot of the windows integration, where in a corporate environment the same network calls with the same syntax authenticate successfully with 4.8 but fail with core.

And because they broke backward compatibility on so many libraries, it's a non trivial effort to convert a complex code base to core.

It's great that they focus on performance, but the .net framework fossilised in term of functionality. It took like 15 years before they added a json serializer to the standard library, and don't even think about support for any new major image format (webp, heic). Everything has become complicated, there isn't a day where I don't see a crash message in visual studio. I used to be a big .net fan but I miss Anders' leadership.