I used this back in the Vista times and it worked very well. Very similar to how people use WSL these days.
Microsoft already knew Hyper-V quite well so a VM made sense, they just had to put some automagic management around it.
But the one thing they would never be able to overcome was CUDA and kernel modules. If you show people "Linux" and they can't build their software, then it might as well be hot garbage.
I use WSL2 daily and far more often than my actual Linux VMs. It's not the fastest, but it did solve a huge chunk of the problems with WSL1. No, it's not native, but I already have 3 monitors, a huge tower, and a Mac Mini M1 on my desk. I didn't need a native box at my fingertips (those go on a rack in the basement, lol).
WSL2 cross-OS I/O performance is lower than WSL1. Especially with the random access patterns and constant stat/access calls made by Linux-targetting programs. However that should be the rare option to take. Working on native ext4 FS of WSL2 is almost as fast as running native Linux. So you should really copy files in and work on them in WSL.