Truthfully, I don't think that has much to do with it. There is a real cultural difference between the MS ecosystem, Linux or no, and the traditional open source ecosystem.
I was simultaneously an open source advocate (using FreeBSD 3.0) back at the point when NT4 was supposed to take over the world, and using VB and the Microsoft JVM. Back then and still today there's a lot of cruft with the MS ecosystem.
What I'm getting at is if you look at truly advanced software and what might be called "engineering" practices, there seems to be no correlation with marketing hype. Cosmos is to me the most advanced cloud NoSQL database out there feature-for-feature. I think Citus is the coolest sharded database in its particular space. C# has been pretty advanced relative to say Java for quite some time. Windows systems engineers did in fact know quite a lot, despite all the crud they had to put up with the endless parade of new MS features. The best ops person I know that built a huge unicorn that runs on Linux uses Windows as his laptop when everyone else uses Mac.
There's a bad habit in tech news of looking at the success of a company and equating it with the talent or technology choices of the engineering team. Very often, successful businesses provide enough padding for unsophisticated trendy technology to fail without consequence to the business. Likewise, many low-margin, crummy businesses are only around because they have high tech talent which can compensate.
