AOT is not all that useful yet for many applications as important libraries still don't support it. So more something for things like CLI tools with a small scope.
It's not quite the same as with Go, the binaries get large if you can't trim them. But creating single-file self-contained executables is very much usable and works well otherwise.
splitting hairs, but its is not independent. AoT is a required pre-requisite for single-binary creation. You can't create single-binaries with JIT. And that is the big hurdle, lot of libraries do not support AoT and that is the blocker to create single-file binary. Once you have the AoT figured out, the single-binary creation is easy.
.NET AOT right now is a very specialized solution that isn't widely applicable. Self-contained and single-file binaries do work pretty much out of the box already.
See the documention here for the PublishSingleFile and SelfContained options:
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/core/deploying/sing...