I mean sure it’s not, but back in the late 2000s I did everything under it and it made for a great experience. It’s little package manager was handy, everything I needed was there, it worked surprisingly well.

I agree. I recently bailed on WSL because my poor crappy laptop was buckling under the weight of the extra resource demand.

I’m not using Cygwin, but similarly, I decided to trick out my git bash with extra packages from MSYS2. I have all the Linux tools I need, been having a great experience with it.

The amount of resources it takes to run WSL, or a virtual box on older hardware can be devastating. You don’t hear this mentioned much.

WSL1 doesn't use a virtual machine, and only implements Linux syscalls as NT kernel syscalls. There's no VM or OS overhead; WSL1 is 100% userland software, except for the kernel translation stuff.

You should not have any issues with WSL1 in terms of system load or "weight" (whatever the hell that is supposed to mean in computer terms. This is used all the time and I've never once seen a definition for it. What is the unit of measurement? What's the border between "lightweight" and "not lightweight?" This industry as a whole ingests far too many hallucinogens. )

Cygwin offers excellent out-of-the-box GNU userland functionality. It is fast and open-source, with a generous set of packages and languages. I can pin it and have a stable, internally consistent GNU userland. Very good for a developer using several interpreted languages.

Cygwin has its quirks and flaws, like any software. But so does a full distro (Ubuntu, no less) running inside Windows 10.

WSL1 isn't a full distro, it's only the userland stuff. You can also easily make your own userland in Linux, tar it up the deploy it as a WSL environment. It's really nice.