Interestingly I get the same error if I change the pragma test to "BLAH"
> >lld-link: error: BLAH is not allowed in .drectve
I suspect something is going wrong when passing the linker options from pragma to the linker itself.
However, if I uncomment the pragma and explicitly place the manifest file it works (as you mentioned before). I will use it this way for now. But fixing the pragma will be awesome if we can get rid of the manifest file.