What does this change imply? Does this mean that 2021.2 now fully supports .NET 5 runtime beyond the recent compiler upgrades in 2021.1 that enabled some C# 9 language features?
I dont think the phrase to run on implies changes to the .NET5 runtime being supported automagically.
Unity has been moving more and more of their internal tooling to new .net versions which is the patchnotes you are seeing here. These are only called from the editor as external processes and won’t affect the current runtime used for the game.
According to the latest info from unity employees posted around the forum we will probably see a mono upgrade first and the upgrade to .net (core) will only happen with .net >= 6 due to the involved effort but it seems they are actively investigating this change now.
Yes, this means that the il2cpp.exe managed utility will run via .NET 5 now. It does not mean that .NET 5 class library features are available. That latter thing is actively being worked on now, but we don’t have an ETA for release yet.
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