I don't think PowerShell is able to use Native AOT compilation. The blog explicitly states that loading extra code at runtime is not possible, but AFAIK this is required for PowerShell commandlets.

I never cared about the start time of a shell.

What really bothered me were the IBM RAD Studio for Websphere 5.x start times back in 2005.

Now the few ms that PowerShell takes?

I can live with that, no need to go for breakfast while devenv is booting up.

    C:\dev> (Measure-Command { pwsh -c exit }).TotalMilliseconds
    1394.1826
    C:\dev> (Measure-Command { pwsh -noprofile -c exit }).TotalMilliseconds
    247.4816

Non-cold start on a 14-core Skylake-X. Drives me nuts.

On an i7-8700 w Kingston NVMe:

    PS C:\Users\me> (Measure-Command { pwsh -c exit }).TotalMilliseconds
    265.3785

    PS C:\Users\me> (Measure-Command { powershell -noprofile -c exit }).TotalMilliseconds
    119.481

On mine:

(Measure-Command { powershell(Measure-Command { powershell -c exit }).TotalMilliseconds 768.5885

(Measure-Command { powershell -noprofile -c exit }).TotalMilliseconds 113.3157

Why isn’t there a constantly running daemon, making the actual binary run as a shell be a tiny executable doing some network calls only?

There was a discussion around that but that was scuttled because aot was com inng up

If you are restarting your PowerShell session all the time, you must be really busy. /s

It does. Try using a different anti-malware solution instead, or check which Powershell modules are loaded automatically in your session.