Yep, WSL1 was a translation layer. Extremely awesome but unfortunately dog slow for anything involving npm packages or large(r) PHP environments as all file acc

Yep, WSL1 was a translation layer. Extremely awesome but unfortunately dog slow for anything involving npm packages or large(r) PHP environments as all file accesses would go through the translation layer, the Windows filter chain (aka virus scanners) and then finally NTFS. WSL2 in contrast is a VM, which avoids all the slow paths in file accesses - all that Windows sees is a bunch of bulk block I/O to the backing file of the VM disk.