[Problem]: WebView2 won't work outside of a UI thread

What happened?

Several issues come to the same conclusions:

The WV2's API need to run in a UI thread [from #3617]

there was no UI thread in my application, causing the await to hang [from #202 ]

This causes a hard dependency on heavy Windows DLLs to use a Dispatcher, and forces the host app to run as STA (Single-Threaded Apartment), de facto excluding async main for console apps (see this closed issue).

It would be beneficial to make this dependency more explicit and less cumbersome, eg:

• expose a way to create a CoreWebView2 without any reference to a UI framework and without creating an unused CompositionController
• remove dependency to a IntPtr hwnd when creating the webview
• expose a way to initialize a CoreWebView2 by passing in a Dispatcher, to make the dependency more explicit
• remove WPF/Winforms from the NuGet package for purely headless uses
• document the issue more clearly and document the headless mode more clearly

Importance

Moderate. My app's user experience is affected, but still usable.

Runtime Channel

Stable release (WebView2 Runtime)

Runtime Version

No response

SDK Version

No response

Framework

Other

Operating System

Windows 11

OS Version

No response

Repro steps

in a blank console app Program.cs:

var env = await CoreWebView2Environment.CreateAsync();
var controller = await env.CreateCoreWebView2ControllerAsync(new IntPtr(-3)); // doesn't complete
var coreWebView = controller.CoreWebView2; // never reached

Repros in Edge Browser

Not Applicable

Regression

No, this never worked

Last working version (if regression)

No response

AB#48454374