It may be because he couldn't get IntelliJ to work native in a way that let him access WSL, ("It also wasn't able to access WSL, meaning I was locked out of using Linux tooling all together.") So that tooling was awkward.

If he was stuck using windows, maybe best bet would have been to run an X server and run IntelliJ etc inside WSL itself.

Hi, author here, you are correct! WSL tooling was locked out for a long time due to IntelliJ not being able to access WSL until the native build came down. Unfortunately, WSL on ARM still has some bugs around the VM hard locking itself when waking from sleep. It's frustrating, because when it does work it's fantastic.

Have you tried a standard VM? It sucks that WSL2 isn't working right yet, but IntelliJ has some pretty extensive tooling for working over a (virtual) network. It's possible that the sleep issue plagues normal VMs as well, but maybe it's worth a shot?

You'd lose out on things like hardware accelerated graphics but reading your description it sounds like that's not really something you rely on anyway.

I do run ubuntu 22.04 in a VM, it works fine for things that aren't graphical and it has the usual performance penalties that come with connecting via a RDP connection, but it's a nice alternative when I need it. I haven't tried IntelliJ via virtual network to the VM though, that's a novel idea, I'll give it a go!