My company has some apps that we need to install on our customers servers. A linker would have been amazing for us 7 years ago as we could have targeted the (as of then new) 4.0 runtime and redistributed or binary. But as it was, we could only expect the 2.0 runtime to be installed so we can't really leverage a lot of stuff that's been out since then and had to write our own hacky versions of lots of common things.

Nowadays with dotnet core you can bundle the entire runtime with you binary. The linker is cool, in that it will create a strictly smaller binary, as in "hello world" might be 12mb instead of 50mb. That's cool, but it makes me wonder if .NET would be in a strategically better place today if the linker were present 10 years ago. How many companies didn't choose to write their app in c# simply because a customer might not have the runtime installed?

In any case I'm really impressed with everything Microsoft is doing with dotnet core and hope that I get to use more of it.