Was this recently? Things change really fast, within the last year or so we got ionide and core clr support. I've read of people preferring the experience of F# in VSCode these days.

Just a few weeks ago I got an F# project with TensorFlowSharp up and running on OSX in VSCode with the ionide extension. It JustWorked™.

In any case, I'd suggest you give it a crack again if you are interested. The experience has improved greatly and the tooling seems pretty great now on Linux/OSX. I've been following it for 3-4 years though, so I certainly understand how it would seem like a non-starter in the recent past.

I found getting F# dev environment set up on Ubuntu was super easy. That said that I found Merlin in Vim to be better than Jetbrains Rider. With Ocaml/Reason you should be able deploy via native binary. The build times and deployment story are going to be similar to Golang on the backend - if it works. With F# you have to deploy the CLR too.