It's definitely good practice to do a restore before invoking the console tool. I believe the console tool does invoke 'msbuild /t:Restore', though I'm not sure how reliable this command is in the latest MS toolset.

A critical change in the above build was adding additional search paths for the .NET Core SDK libraries. Prior to this build, NCrunch could only work with the libraries inside your user's Nuget packages directory. Now, it should use both the user Nuget packages directory and the Nuget fallback directory under the dotnet install path. I would have thought that your missing library could have been resolved to the fallback path, but it's possible that dotnet wants it as a user package. Nothing about the structure of this platform is feeling very certain for me at the moment.