In .NET 5+ you shouldn't need to install runtimes, though. Self-contained folder full of DLLs output is the default publishing build today and very reliable at this point (and doesn't have the same restrictions as trying to AOT compile and treeshake everything into a single self-contained EXE).

Obviously, there's a trade off in size having a whole folder of files, some of which would be redundant with other applications, but folder of files using xcopy only deployments have seemed to become the standard in .NET. (Or perhaps more commonly, folder full of files added to a minimal "no runtime" Docker container overlay.)

I don't think I've ever seen a global install of a .NET 5+ runtime. I wouldn't be surprised if some Enterprise was doing it for some belief in HD space savings, but I've certainly not seen it. Just file folder deploys.