Honestly, I don't think I have used cygwin since WSL came out (and it was pretty common for me to use linux vms even before then).

The notable exception is that I indirectly use MSYS2 (which is effectively a fork of cygwin) as part of using git for windows. Git for Windows includes an msys2 environment so that the portions of git that are written as shell scripts or perl scripts, etc can run properly. While you can launch the "git bash" directly, and pre-wsl that could be useful, the MSYS is mostly there because Git for Window's git.exe will automatically launch subcommands in that environment.

Cygwin is extremely lightweight, it's basically just a library implementing the POSIX syscalls, and native win32 apps linked to it.

Since it's so lightweight, you can have, use, and throw away as many cygwin envs (folders) as you like.

It doesn't require any Windows subsystem, hypervisor, admin rights, Linux distribution or anything, and will even work on an XP machine should you need it.

Finally: much less bloat to run and store.

> Why do people still use cygwin, and not WSL or an actual linux?

A. Cygwin works and has been around for a long time. B. Cygwin programs are native windows procs.

At $CURRENT_JOB I have no access to virtualization on Windows and I am forced to use some flavour of MSYS2 to access basic survival tools.

I would guess that it does not use WSL or an actual Linux because it was written for use on Windows, and at a time when many of the Windows installations then in use were of a version that did not offer WSL.

I think it's likely the author found instructions on installing COBOL that were written well before WSL was a thing.

Also most corporates wont let you use WSL or linux because...