It's gonna blow your mind when you realize that `dotnet publish` produces an artifact that IS machine-independent, and that you would just distribute that. Or if it somehow really bothers you, put it in a self-extracting ZIP or MSI, wow, so much better. And I don't know what golden age of the Internet you grew up on, but there's always been "apps" distributed as zips, or as more than just a single binary.

I get that you have opinions, but you seem to have entirely missed that the runtime is downloaded at build time and included in the bundle. And god forbid if you like doing everything by hand, you don't have to use Nuget and you can manage every last dep by hand, however you like (and you'll likely end up hacking something that is less usable than just setting up a private nuget server, but "opinions").