If you're talking about running a node project in WSL2 vs in an emulator or VM etc it might just be that most of the speedup comes from Linux and WSL2 itself, as it's quite fast. What you've mentioned isn't a controlled experiment for testing performance
WSL2 is a VM, though. It was only WSL1 that tried to do a kernel-level shim for the Linux userspace layer.
Antivirus on Windows are notorious at inserting itself as filesystem filters that triggered on every file access, which adds overhead into every read and write action. Combined with node_modules containing gazillion files, I'm surprised his project only loads in 2 minutes :)