From the side-lines it looks like they're slowly becoming an unstoppable dominant force, what's surprising to me is AWS's / GCP's inaction, they're either asleep at the wheel or they don't see Microsoft's dev mindshare grab as a threat.
Seems like every generation re-invents this idea, and every time it fails for the same fatal flaw: Illusions are just that, and you'll wind up hacking around the illusion if you want to do something not envisioned (or run into a bug in the secret sauce).
And before someone replies "it is nothing like Web Forms!!!" here's a direct quote from Blazor's homepage:
> Blazor can run your client logic on the server. Client UI events are sent back to the server using SignalR - a real-time messaging framework. Once execution completes, the required UI changes are sent to the client and merged into the DOM.
That's literally how Web Forms worked.
I'm also not sure why you are conflating Silverlight with Web Forms - it was never competing with Web Forms, it was client-side only, a replacement to Flash - a better UI and API (at the time) than HTML/CSS/JS.
Blazor is OSS, and doesn't work like Web Forms.
As in your own quote, Blazor uses SignalR - which uses push-based comms, such as Web Sockets; Web Forms was standard HTTP.
I was a Web Forms developers, I've earned at least that. Blazor absolutely does work like Web Forms, in terms of client<->server integration, just because it uses WebAssembly & SignalR instead of JavaScript & Ajax doesn't really change that but rather obfuscates it. Essentially it is just another set of abstractions attempting to paper over a real boundary.
> As in your own quote, Blazor uses SignalR - which uses push-based comms, such as Web Sockets; Web Forms was standard HTTP.
Which makes it even worse, if the client/server boundary wasn't muddied enough with with the unidirectional magic Web Forms used, now we have omnidirectional instead. As if that will make it less complicated and buggy.
Definitely put me in the "nay" category with Blazor. I've danced this exact tango with Microsoft twice before, and their obsession with making browsers desktop-like applications. WebAssembly is cool tech for one day, they're just abusing it for something that is an inherently bad idea.