literally just make the development experience on Windows less painful so people don’t switch to another OS.

You said it right there yourself and don’t seem to realize it.

Why have a laptop or a dual boot with Linux when you can now more easily stay on the proprietary OS ?

This is called market retention.

Preventing migration to another OS, another software ecosystem.

The ‘Embrace’ and ‘Extend’ parts of EEE.

And if it works, then in a few years, MSFT will figure out how to further monetize some other part of its software ecosystem that is either reliant on, or much much easier for an average user of WSL to use than switching their whole setup or stack all the way over to Linux.

Call that EEM for ‘monetization’ if you want, or ‘enshittify’ for another E…

…the commonly used term to describe software or services or platforms that suddenly jump over to making previously free stuff cost money, put ads everywhere, break the previously free features and put the ‘new’ working versions behind some kind of paywall…

… All after you’ve captured your market and dominated as many competitors as possible.

Standard monopolist strategy throughout the entite history of capitalism, same general concept goes back even further.