Applications using Ahead-of-Time (AOT) trimming will always include the ability to parse NLog-configuration, because NLog will perform automatic loading of NLog.config on initial call to NLog.LogManager.GetCurrentClassLogger().

To reduce the footprint of NLog even further, then one could consider to remove this automatic-loading. This will of course have side-effects for all applications that doesn't use AOT, and will make most tutorials obsolete.

Alternative introduce new NLog.Basic / NLog.Core nuget-package, and then perform ILMerge into NLog-nuget-package (still single NLog.dll)