> The main difference I encounter between WSL1 and WSL2 is that accessing files across the OS divide happens through a networked filesystem instead of a natively shared filesystem

This has been my biggest gripe with WSL and linux virtualization on windows. WSL1 wouldn't work with some weirdly mapped network drives we had and with WSL2 (and linux in general) I don't find the drivers (or samba or some other component) stable enough when you're doing large writes to NTFS drives, I've had the same issues with vmware too.

This is one of the big reasons I'm still on cygwin, it's worked for years (maybe decades), it interoperates with windows better and all the little bugs have been worked out. Ultimately it's then GNU tools I'm after, the kernel isn't particularly interesting for my use cases.