I agree. Back in the day (10+ years ago), I used to argue with people about why I ran VMs instead of just partitioning the disk and booting up the OS I needed.

XAMPP did not work out of the box with me on Windows (skill issue on my part, I know), so my preferred setup was to run a Ubuntu Server VM (LAMP stack) and then develop whatever I had on a Windows IDE.

I could have done that under full Linux, I just did not want that. Then Vagrant came into existence, which I'd say was for my use case (but never came around to adopt it).

I'm really happy with my WSL2 setup. I stopped using VMware Workstation when WSL2 broke it, but WSL2 is exactly what I needed to match my use case.