There's a lot of great people in the .NET ecosystem, but I don't think GC internals are that relevant for most typical .NET devs.
Typically, you're right - GC internals aren't usually relevant. That is, until you're fire-fighting a GC-related issue in production. GC internals aren't something you want do a crash-course on while your app burns.
I'd call it a good sign if you can even identify GC-related issues in production. That means all of the other problems that seem to plague .NET shops have been taken care of.
It's always a captivating read for me! I find most discussions about the tradeoffs of GC vs reference counting versus manual memory management are loaded with bias.
There’s definitely more there than most .NET devs need to know, but I personally have found learning more about the GC to be incredibly relevant in my day to day work. I would have said the same thing a year ago, now I feel differently, but that is of course heavily inflected by my personal experience.
Similarly you might not expect that reading CLR via C# would make you a better programmer at a high level with things like DI and big frameworks and everything, but it makes you see what you're writing in an entirely different light. A whole other layer below the surface.
I would strongly second that endorsement. I would love a new edition taking the CoreCLR more into account but it’s still more relevant than most any other book I can think of.
Neat! I would definitely like a .NET Core version, though. I was disappointed to discover netmodules were deprecated
I worked with David Fowler he’s really good.
Matt Warren writes a lot of nice stuff about .NET internals and performance.
You're selling Eric Lippert too short
Just offering my personal opinions (by which I mean biases), Eric is also great. Andrew Lock and Steve Gordon are also great choices. Personally, I prefer nuts and bolts .NET writers since there is so much (and much of it good!) DDD/SOLID type content out there.
Jon Skeet, Mark Seemann, Jeff Richter too
Stephen Toub!
If you read one person about .Net GC performance - Maoni is that person.