And the gap's going to keep growing - doing the upgrade now means future upgrades can be more frequent and incremental, rather than trying to move 4.8 to .NET 20 in a decade.
Basically the kind of customers that were affected by the breaking changes, between Framework and Core, decided to keep the old stuff running in Framework, and consider other alternatives going forward.
Not sure how much these kind of customers matter to the .NET team's upper management in customer acquisition, but they surely lost a few along the way.
And now there is even CoPilot based migration tooling on VS 2026, because most likely there aren't that few that are still chugging along with Framework.