Sometimes you don't know you have a performance problem until you have something to compare it to.
Microsoft's greatest technical own goal of the 2010s was WSL 2.
The original WSL was great in most respects (authentic to how Windows works; just as Windows NT has a "Windows 95" personality, Windows NT can have a "Linux" personality) but had the problem that filesystem access went through the Windows filesystem interface.
The Windows filesystem interface is a lot slower for metadata operations (e.g. small files) than the Linux filesystem interface and is unreformable because the problem is the design of the internal API and the model for security checking.
Nobody really complained that metadata operations in Windows was slow, they just worked around it. Some people though were doing complex build procedures inside WSL (build a Linux Kernel) and it was clear then there was a performance problem relative to Linux.
For whatever reason, Microsoft decided this was unacceptable, so they came out with WSL 2 which got them solidly into Kryptonite territory. They took something which third party vendors could do perfectly well (install Ubuntu in a VM) and screwed it up like only Microsoft can (attempt to install it through the Windows Store, closely couple it to Windows so it almost works, depend on legitimacy based on "it's from Microsoft" as opposed to "it works", ...)
Had Microsoft just accepted that metadata operations were a little bit slow, most WSL users would have accepted it, the ones who couldn't would run Ubuntu in a VM.
WSL2 worked for me in a way that WSL1 did not and it had to do with build times while doing tutorial projects. I am not an expert, but my own experience was that it was a massive improvement.
Parent is not refuting that WSL2 performed better than WSL1, they're arguing that a reasonable response to WSL1 giving you slow build times might have simply been to use a VM instead.
Microsoft being Microsoft, they didn't want people like you to hop to VMware or VirtualBox and use a full, branded instance of Fedora or Ubuntu, because then you would realize that the next hop (moving to Linux entirely) was actually quite reasonable. So they threw away WSL1 and built WSL2. Obviously WSL2 worked better for you than WSL1, but you also did exactly what Microsoft wanted you to do, which is to their benefit, and not necessarily to yours.
Additionally, the problems that held back WSL1 performance still exist, and WSL1 wasn't their only victim. So Microsoft has abandoned WSL1, but they still need to address those underlying problems. Only now, if they do successfully deal with those issues (most likely as part of their DirectStorage effort and cloning io_uring), we're unlikely to see WSL1 updated to benefit—even though that might result in WSL1 becoming a better user experience than WSL2.
Microsoft's greatest technical own goal of the 2010s was WSL 2.
The original WSL was great in most respects (authentic to how Windows works; just as Windows NT has a "Windows 95" personality, Windows NT can have a "Linux" personality) but had the problem that filesystem access went through the Windows filesystem interface.
The Windows filesystem interface is a lot slower for metadata operations (e.g. small files) than the Linux filesystem interface and is unreformable because the problem is the design of the internal API and the model for security checking.
Nobody really complained that metadata operations in Windows was slow, they just worked around it. Some people though were doing complex build procedures inside WSL (build a Linux Kernel) and it was clear then there was a performance problem relative to Linux.
For whatever reason, Microsoft decided this was unacceptable, so they came out with WSL 2 which got them solidly into Kryptonite territory. They took something which third party vendors could do perfectly well (install Ubuntu in a VM) and screwed it up like only Microsoft can (attempt to install it through the Windows Store, closely couple it to Windows so it almost works, depend on legitimacy based on "it's from Microsoft" as opposed to "it works", ...)
Had Microsoft just accepted that metadata operations were a little bit slow, most WSL users would have accepted it, the ones who couldn't would run Ubuntu in a VM.