Accessing mounted drives can be avoided by putting your source code in WSL 2's file system, but it is for sure still a pressing issue since folks tend to have multiple drives and want to access them within WSL.
But to your point, WSL 2 does have some really big issues pending tho, such as https://github.com/microsoft/WSL/issues/4166 and https://github.com/microsoft/WSL/issues/4699. The TL;DR is that WSL 2 will happily use 80% of your system's memory by default and it never frees disk up in the VM that it runs in. The VM's disk will continue to grow and grow unless you as an end user run some PowerShell incantations to shrink the vhdx. In other words, deleting files from within WSL 2 won't clear the disk space used by the VM.
Within like 2 hours of using WSL 2 for the first time I found my system grinding to a halt because it used 11GB of memory and chewed through 60GB of my SSD since when I copied my source code into WSL 2's file system (to avoid the poor performance documented in your issue) I forgot I had a ton of wave files included in one of the directories since I kept those in a private directory in my podcast site's source code.
I don’t get why WSL is better than a Linux VM in hyper-v or virtual box, until it’s way smoother than it currently is. You can full screen the VM to work entirely in dwm or i3 or whatever if that’s your thing, plus Xpra and SSH exist if you want to run Linux stuff alongside Windows (I assume there are free clients for both in Windows?). With that way of working you can even run Linux somewhere else to offload the resource use almost entirely, and if local it takes seconds to suspend the whole thing.
The last thing I’d want, working with Linux tools, is to have another thing I have to eliminate as a source of trouble when anything breaks.
But to your point, WSL 2 does have some really big issues pending tho, such as https://github.com/microsoft/WSL/issues/4166 and https://github.com/microsoft/WSL/issues/4699. The TL;DR is that WSL 2 will happily use 80% of your system's memory by default and it never frees disk up in the VM that it runs in. The VM's disk will continue to grow and grow unless you as an end user run some PowerShell incantations to shrink the vhdx. In other words, deleting files from within WSL 2 won't clear the disk space used by the VM.
Within like 2 hours of using WSL 2 for the first time I found my system grinding to a halt because it used 11GB of memory and chewed through 60GB of my SSD since when I copied my source code into WSL 2's file system (to avoid the poor performance documented in your issue) I forgot I had a ton of wave files included in one of the directories since I kept those in a private directory in my podcast site's source code.