Reasons why I go to/follow conferences:
General scope of what lives amongst the community: what are the new things, what is getting obsolete. .Net or .Net core etc
Some in-depth sessions about items that piqued my interest like Azure Datafactory, Azure identification & authorization
Quick headsup on certain topics, a kind of reference overview which makes in easier to understand concepts. Like AI / ML that is still far of my bed show but are increasingly used. The jupyter-notebooks in Azure Data Studio
Interaction with collegues, what is working for you.
This results in a lot of value for the company roadmap