It's just a somewhat better integrated VM with all the shortcomings that entails...
Having to deal with individual users of various software I'd sometimes resort to using WSL, but this isn't an always acceptable way.
To shed more light: some of the users of the system I'm talking about are hospital researchers. These people are very limited in terms of choices they can make about their computers. While it could be possible sometimes to convince hospital's IT to install / enable WSL, this won't work all the time esp. because it, essentially, allows too much control for the otherwise very restricted user over their workstation. MSYS2 here has an advantage that everything can be packaged as a single program (Git is distributed in this way for example), which makes it easier on the org. IT. In principle, WSL can be used that way too (iirc. Docker does something like it), but you'd still need a bunch of Windows-native wrapping for things to work (i.e. I understand that there needs to be at least one service process that does the peering).
WSL is great so long as everything you need to do runs inside its VM. If you need to access things on the main Windows filesystem, you're basically accessing a networked file system at that point, with all that entails for perf.
Having to deal with individual users of various software I'd sometimes resort to using WSL, but this isn't an always acceptable way.
To shed more light: some of the users of the system I'm talking about are hospital researchers. These people are very limited in terms of choices they can make about their computers. While it could be possible sometimes to convince hospital's IT to install / enable WSL, this won't work all the time esp. because it, essentially, allows too much control for the otherwise very restricted user over their workstation. MSYS2 here has an advantage that everything can be packaged as a single program (Git is distributed in this way for example), which makes it easier on the org. IT. In principle, WSL can be used that way too (iirc. Docker does something like it), but you'd still need a bunch of Windows-native wrapping for things to work (i.e. I understand that there needs to be at least one service process that does the peering).