Well, Linux has won the cloud meaning it is and will be a primary target for .NET. I'm not sure what vested interest MSFT had in some of the changes introduced

Well, Linux has won the cloud meaning it is and will be a primary target for .NET. I'm not sure what vested interest MSFT had in some of the changes introduced for iOS in .NET 8, but now it can be targeted with NativeAOT too, so there is clear investment and dev effort both from community contributors and MSFT employees to support various platforms. Somewhat arbitrary example, there is also a project to support RISC-V (https://github.com/dotnet/runtime/issues/84834 https://github.com/dotnet/runtime/issues/84834).