Impressive technical work and authorship. My quibble, which seems significant in context, is what happened with AoT?

AoT is still a thing. Presumably a lot of the JIT improvements would also improve the generation of AoT-compiled code.

I hope that’s the case but I’d feel a lot better to see it in print.

do you mean NativeAoT? it's mentioned a few times in the post

It still exists, it's still a bit quirky because of the way you need to match CPU to binary (e.g. some opcode extensions only existing on some CPUs)