Today, you have a dependency on JSON.NET in some fundamental components (for example, Microsoft.Extensions.DependencyMode). This has the unfortunate side-effect that it becomes either difficult or impossible for end users to choose something newer without either running up against potential incompatibilities, or being outright unable to do so at all (for example, in a plugin model application which leverages M.E.D to load dependencies, but does so after the older JSON.NET has already been loaded).

An example of this dependency which becomes a hard-blocker is unit testing w/ xUnit.net, which uses M.E.D to load the dependencies of the unit test libraries. See: xunit/xunit#1060

I've previously discussed this with a few team members, but notably @DamianEdwards indicated that removing this in a point release (f.e. the upcoming 2.1) would be considered to be a breaking change. I'm not 100% sure I agree with that assessment, but either way, this is not a great situation for end users to be in, to have dependencies on things your team doesn't ship and doesn't control the revisions of.