> C# doesn't depend on a VM these days when it is AOT compiled

Maybe I’m being pedantic, but this is an oxymoron. Also the premise is incorrect. It’s not like the VM is gone. Merely baked into the code at compile time. It compiles IL to native code. Same for IL2CPP. The VM is still there.

The term “virtual machine” is confusing. I think you meant to say JIT compiler :-)

The trouble with that level of pedantry is that you then can point to LLVM as a VM and say that Clang and other C/C++/Rust tools that AOT through LLVM are "too tied to a virtual machine". Then you can go back through the history of cross-platform optimizing C/C++ compilers and find VMs in the design in almost all of those, too. LLVM is not hiding it in its very clear name, but low-level VMs were a thing for decades before someone named LLVM.

VMs have a long history in cross-compilation, even for "low-level" languages like C/C++. The AOT versus JIT distinction is blurry, and the "VM language" versus "non-VM language" boundary is blurrier still, especially when you take into account "standard runtimes" such as glibc and vcrt and whether or not those are statically linked.

Is a C program with a compiled with Clang through the LLVM dynamically linking a glibc and statically linking a Boehm GC library "running in a VM"? There's no wrong answer, it's a lot shades of gray. I believe almost every pedantic way to answer that has an equally pedantic counter-argument.