Indeed, WSL1 isn't a VM. As I said, it's just:

> an emulation layer for Linux syscalls on top of quite a different operating system.

My point was that, in principle, it could be possible to implement Linux containers on another OS without using VMs.

However, as you said (and so did I), in practice no one has. Probably because it's just not worth the effort compared to just using a VM. Especially since all your containers can share a single VM, so you end up only running 2 kernels (rather than e.g. 11 for 10 containers). That's exactly how Docker on WSL2 works.