I am sorry that I came across as abrasive, however the points I raised, are as far as I know, factual (and echoed by others' comments). I don't think ignoring them would be constructive.

During the 'decade' where CoreCLR was not a solution, Mono (Xamarin) still was - in fact their entire commercial appeal (before they were bought out by Microsoft) was that they provided an AOT compiled .NET for mobile devices.

Unity got stuck on an ancient version compared to the more modern Mono implementations (I think this is the case to this day), and Unity's version was much, much slower.

Afair, most of the time, the MS version had them (Xamarin) beat, but the difference wasn't huge, between the two, especially compared to Unity's mono. It was an AOT runtime, not sure about Nintendo, but their entire business model hinged on being able to ship to Apple's app store.

I hate to dig up the past, but Unity's long-standing issue was their ancient GC (which was not incremental then), combined with a simple compiler bug, that made every foreach loop allocate an iterator on the heap. The combination of the two meant that basically every non-trial Unity game that used foreach extensively, stuttered. This simple compiler fix took them years to upstream, with people hacking around the issue by replacing the shipped compiler with a patched one.

And I still stand by my point - if Unity went with an upstream Mono, and made it convenient and easy to link with C++ code, it'd have had the same or better performance out of the box as they had with their exotic stuff.

And I also back up the fact that Unity's marketing was deceptive - HPC#/Burst/DOTS/ECS was marketed as some gateway to previously unheard of performance, but when some people went around benchmarking it, basic sensible C++ had it beat (I can't find the benchmarks rn, but multithreaded DOTS was slower than single threaded c++ in a simulation).

What I said about Burst holds up as well.

These are not tradeoffs, but bad technical deicisions, whose legitimacy can be only defended when you ignore the most sensible alternatives.

i suppose you could speculate, why do i feel Unity's marketing isn't deceptive; why do I think it's a pretty well written game engine; and why am i ignoring these points about C# performance? because i'm stupid? i can't really say, because i'll be downvoted haha. a lot of smart, wise successful game developers choose unity...