But...it works in this exact way?
dotnet publish -o folder -p:PublishAot=true
On Visual Studio, I have started to recommend to newcomers to avoid its publishing UI which is convoluted and is easy to get side-tracked with. CLI offers much cleaner UX. Not that it matters outside of Windows. But you don't need to create publish file either, just tick the boxes you care about in the modal window.
Edit: you can't be serious, no one in their sane mind would consider a single extra keyword to get the final product once you're done writing code a learning curve too steep, unless you're in a bad mood and want to make a bad faith argument. Consider what you make the comparison against - C and C++ with their CMake, Ninja, or even raw MSBuild, Swift is barely better too. Rust with Cargo is about the same amount of effort as .NET CLI. Cmon, Pjmlp.
However this is somehow cumbersome versus doing a plain "aot-lang-compiler source -o binary".
Which is the experience I think the team should strive on as goal, especially for newcomers.
More so when comparing IDE experience of something like Delphi or Swift to keep it in context (press build), versus Visual Studio (besides csproj, create publish properties file, followed by a solution publish, which is hardly documented still).