Those are runtime environments provided by DLLs (requiring recompilation), not Wine-like translation layers. WSL 1 was something special, and it says something that Microsoft ditched it in favour of "we've invented virtual machines for the very first time!!!".
It’s been a while since I’ve played with Cygwin and I do recall there were a lot of stuff compiled for Windows, but couldn’t it also run Linux software run natively too?
Admittedly back then I was working for a place that mainly developed in Perl, so I didn’t port a whole lot of ELFs across. So maybe I’m misremembering
When I was on the team migrating datacenters, we got ahold of tcpdump.exe which didn't need winpcap presumably because it was staticly compiled under cygwin - I'm fairly certain someone didn't write the entire thing including winpcap from scratch.
It was nice because getting anything approved by the windows sysadmin group was like changing the tire on a moving truck.
It was more than a godsend, because when a windows server was plugging into "the wrong vlan" we could just give them the tcpdump command to capture a CDP/LLDP packet and tell us which switch and port the box was physically connected to.
