Ironically, I still prefer using Cygwin to WSL despite the impedance mismatch with Windows. I really wish that Microsoft had been able to make WSL1 work better instead of giving up and going with the VM route with WSL2.
Manager prematurely distrusting developers syndrome, WSL1 had serious MMAP issues that was delayed as "low-prio" that wasn't fixed until late in the cycle (probably long after the decision to go with WSL2 was taken). Once those were fixed a ton of "weird" bugs magically got fixed.
Sure WSL1 could never have handled docker as-is, but general software would've been mostly fine and given us damn good windows application integration. (And I'm sure some Docker shims would've appeared fairly quickly to satisfy most basic developer needs).
Most likely - just like shims popped up to share PuTTY's ssh-agent with WSL1.
These days I'm just running a full blown Linux DE in a VirtualBox VM since its graphic console isn't objectively terrible like Hyper-V. If for some reason I need to copy/sync files with the Windows host - well that's just an rsync away thanks to Cywgin.
Sure WSL1 could never have handled docker as-is, but general software would've been mostly fine and given us damn good windows application integration. (And I'm sure some Docker shims would've appeared fairly quickly to satisfy most basic developer needs).