How much of this is due to use in games and Mono?
You can find the overview of relevant high-level types here: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/standard/simd
For low-level types and historical context: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/dotnet/dotnet-8-hardware-intr...
It was after all enabling games to use SIMD with C# (with MonoGame and Unity), even if their interface wasn't the winning one in the end.