Playing devil's advocate, one could argue, especially in the case of WSL2, that it's a Windows subsystem that allows Linux to run particularly well by providing

Playing devil's advocate, one could argue, especially in the case of WSL2, that it's a Windows subsystem that allows Linux to run particularly well by providing virtual devices etc which can be accessed from the Linux VM. It's a bit of a stretch, and Microsoft's true motivation for the naming is almost certainly different, but hey, an argument can be made ;)