from the perspective of a rust, c, c++ developer it was a bit slow as all GC based languages are. Before this .net core was already arguably the gc language with the highest performance ceiling.

this can of course depend on workload and whether you care about startup time or throughput vs tail latency etc, but on the whole it tended to allow you beat out java, go and other competitors most of the time.

with AOT being a standard option now, getting quick startup time is easier too, along with the other improvements

No, in reality 3.1 was actually very fast.