Re: Device drivers
You put a good argument here, but I disagree. First, the WSL1 shim is not very good as demonstrated by the huge overhead of the filesystem operations and incomplete implementation. Secondly, it was stuck at the emulation of the old kernel 4.4 and no strategy to bring the version forward. They figured it will be more cost effective to use the real thing, with some GPL-ed patches added and I think that's the right decision (even though I am unlikely to by affected by it). Hypervisor technology has progressed significantly in the few past years: all cloud providers rely on it, you can now have hypervisor on your phone without realizing it, and running a home computer inside a VM for AAA gaming is perfectly normal (for some).
Just get rid of the notion that what VMWare is selling to the world is somehow "top of the class" because it is not. You might also investigate the IOMMU device pass-through while learning about more modern VM.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
