The problem is as follows: you write some shared framework .NET Core app and deploy it with dotnet.exe. You want to provide a plugin model where people can provide custom assemblies for you to load. Those assemblies will have their own dependencies. However, there's no mechanism to have a secondary, recursive *.deps.json for the plugin's dependencies. This means that every plugin is responsible for hooking assembly resolve and doing their own resolution, which gets overwhelmingly complicated very quickly.

CoreCLR should probably provide some functionality, perhaps in AssemblyLoadContext, to support recursive nesting of shared framework loading.