[throwaway798214]

Separate network stacks? Separate filesystems? Separate processes and memory allocation? With WSL1 processes started from WSL console appear on Windows Task manager and starting a network daemon on WSL1 uses the Windows network stack and firewall. There's no NAT, no bridging and no VPN problems as you truly are running just a single operating system. WSL2 using but not releasing memory? Not a problem with WSL1 as it doesn't allocate any memory, it just runs processes on top of Windows kernel.

Of course WSL1 has it's limitations as it's not Linux but Windows with Linux userland - anything that touches the Linux kernel directly pretty much doesn't work (like loop mounts etc).