On October 20th, the PR #22217 was created (and later merged) in the dotnet/sdk repository. This change, named Remove Hot Reload support from dotnet watch, removed this awaited feature from the dotnet CLI and left it available only in Visual Studio 2022. Note that this change was done a few days before .NET 6 release (releasing on 2021-11-08), removing it from this version. The PR removed around 2,500 lines of code from the .NET SDK.

Microsoft explained their reasoning in a blog post called Update on .NET Hot Reload progress and Visual Studio 2022 Highlights.

With these considerations, we’ve decided that starting with the upcoming .NET 6 GA release, we will enable Hot Reload functionality only through Visual Studio 2022 so we can focus on providing the best experiences to the most users. […] To clarify, we are not releasing Hot Reload as a feature of the dotnet watch tool.

This statement and removal resulted in a large backlash and discussion from the open-source .NET community. The Verge covers this story with information from the inside of Microsoft in their article called Microsoft angers the .NET open source community with a controversial decision. The main complains were that the feature should keep cross-platform support and not limit it to Windows (and later Mac through VS for Mac).

One of the protesting developer created the PR #22262 reverting the changes. This PR is one of the most (if not the most) approved PR in the history of GitHub, accumulating 417 unique approving reviews with a total of 523 PR participants at the time of writing.

This PR was merged in around 29 hours

with a follow-up blog post (.NET Hot Reload Support via CLI) from Microsoft apologizing about the change.

This decision was followed by another story from The Verge called Microsoft reverses controversial .NET change after open source community outcry.