I am unconvinced that there is a meaningful conversation to have about this. Every time any topic comes up in the context of Microsoft, someone chimes in to state that it’s not their experience. Yeah, Microsoft is not a monolithic entity. It’s literally 130 thousand employees and tens of thousands of contractors. For literally any topic, there will be a subset of people who feel their immediate organization doesn’t match the direction the company intends.

Top down mandate cannot align 130k employees on every topic, even if that attempt were an appropriate thing for upper management to spend their time on.

There might be a more interesting conversation if context were given. If the comment about management not caring about RESTful APIs is coming from someone working as part of a team focused on public APIs, it’s a lot more interesting than someone working on desktop clients.

Edit: You know what, you’re right. I read the comment as a flippant “pft, that’s not my experience” and responded as such. I should have assumed better intent. Maybe the commenter was questioning why their experience doesn’t match up with this. Maybe they were asking why management isn’t pushing this effectively. I assumed a specific intent and should have considered different potential intentions.