The reason they pivoted away from wrapping linux syscalls, etc. was that ultimately efficiently supporting features tied tightly to hardware (eg; CUDA) became e

The reason they pivoted away from wrapping linux syscalls, etc. was that ultimately efficiently supporting features tied tightly to hardware (eg; CUDA) became extremely difficult (at least, achieving decent performance). Virtualization is so efficient nowadays that it's much performant to go that route vs porting where often there will be difficult to debug performance regressions and bugs. So what WSL provides instead is much tighter integration between that linux VM and windows (including performant filesystem access, etc.).