The problem arises when running cargo build from within a VS project and targeting something other than the native arch (e.g., using msbuild.exe myproj.sln /p:Platform=otherarch). When cargo builds a build script, it uses the target linker (added to PATH by Visual Studio) instead of the host linker, which naturally fails.

This is a problem as of Rust 1.83 due to the following fix: #1201. That PR also contains some discussion about this issue.