At work we develop on Windows virtual machines, and WSL1 won't run on a VM. Fortunately WSL2 does, so at least I can enjoy Linux tooling I sorely missed.
Interesting, I would expect the opposite problem since WSL1 doesn't use virtualisation in any way. Do you have more details about the error you experienced?
Unfortunately I tried WSL1, didn't work, and left it at that for months. When WSL2 was out, it just worked and I had forgotten by then what kind of error WSL1 gave me.
I can only recall it was a dialog box, not a crash, and that it had to do about virtualization.