Agreed. ActiveState has had that as a commercial offering for quite some time (https://www.activestate.com/products/) and Red Hat is getting into it with (OpenShift) Application Runtimes. Given that providing such a thing is hard not-so-fun work I have a hard time seeing it getting available for free. (ASP).NET Core might be alone in being well-financed and free, something I think will lure (enterprise software) developers over long-term.