Hm, I don’t know the reason but I shipped a game with Unity 2019.3.13 and custom passes working in game. Maybe it’s related to the specific shader code.
@Bordeaux_Fox thanks for replying. Is there any chance you can share shader code, without actual effect code, just declarations and includes? At this point I am kind of a desperate since there’s absolutely no clue what’s happening.
Shader stripping is at lowest setting, I turned on build shader debug and only thing I got is this:
What I did is simply take the official samples from Unity about custom passes as a template. Not sure if they are outdated for your versions. But it is good to start with them to get things working.