My understanding is the opposite; now that they're planning to merge Mono and CoreCLR, there is significantly more pressure on the .NET team to have a proper AO

My understanding is the opposite; now that they're planning to merge Mono and CoreCLR, there is significantly more pressure on the .NET team to have a proper AOT solution. "Early adopters can experiment with native AOT form factor" is a priority-zero (highest priority) epic for .NET 6: https://github.com/dotnet/runtimelab/issues/248 https://github.com/dotnet/runtimelab/issues/248