In my experience, WSL 2 with Node, Terminal and VSCode has felt like a first class experience. It's miles ahead of WSL 1, which was theoretically a great idea, but failed in practice.
Indeed. Do you know what technical factors made WSL1 undesirable in practice? Why were the disk performance issues insurmountable? Why was it so hard to maintain? The reverse, WINE, is arguably very successful.
I highly doubt things like mounting filesystems ( I do run BTRFS for LXD in my WSL2 system) or other just-slightly-beyond-posix things would work reliably or at all with such kind of emulation that WSL1 do. In other words - it would never be Linux enough as native Linux (with VM type of WSL2).
I.e. I still use both WSL1+WSL2, but WSL1 is basically a very small shim when I need some socat/grep/shell & where it needs to share networking with main system, while main work is much better in WSL2.