The smallest footprint for an actual scripting probably will be posix sh - since you already have it ready.

A slightly bigger footprint would be Python or Lua.

If you can drop your requirement for actual scripting and are willing to add a compile step, Go and it’s ecosystem is pretty dang powerful and it’s really easy to learn for small automation tasks.

Personally, with the requirement of not adding too much space for runtimes, I’d write it in go. You don’t need a runtime, you can compile it to a really small zero dependency lib and you have clean and readable code that you can extend, test and maintain easily.

Or you can just use vscodium.

If you use a dockerized environment, that will only work better on Linux. .NET8 is AFAIK natively supported on Linux, so there shouldn’t be too much of an issue apart from the usual clunkyness. Visual Studio will probably be more of a problem. The “easiest” way would probably be to switch to jet brains or vscode. If you are hardstuck on VS for whatever reasons, you probably should be able to do some voodoo with running it in docker and using the container as a remote desktop, but this will be PITA to setup and maintain.