NativeAOT has multiple reflection compatibility modes because most code bases rely on it one way or another. Reflection-free mode works in a limited set of scenarios but greatly reduces the binary size since the compiler and linker can reason much better about which parts of the code they can trim away during compilation.

I didn't know about reflection compatibility modes. Thanks!

I hope source generators will eventually replace reflection from most libraries, so that reflection-free mode can become more mainstream.