> That means that I check out repositories on the virtual disk and run everything from there. This has the slight inconvenience that I can’t easily access those files with Finder, but the upside is that there is no noticeable IO latency issues like when running Docker for Mac.

Yes. Except on Windows it is easy to access WSL files.

I used to use a setup similar to this before WSL was a thing (Hyper-V VM). The "accessing your files" issue trips people up but there's a trivial solution.. install Samba in your dev VM and mount it on the host.

Unsurprisingly, WSL2 does something similar (it uses the 9p protocol instead of SMB though).