WSL2 is just a Hyper-V VM with some UI integrations. It uses an actual Linux kernel rather than a NT kernel personality, so systemd should work like in any other VM.

It is not just Hyper-V VM with some UI integrations. While it uses actual Linux kernel, it does not use actual init system as a just a VM would. It runs Microsoft's /init, which does not handle service management. Not even SysV ones via /etc/init.d.

So if you need service managment, you won't find it under WSL2.

Why would you assume he is deploying to a prod environment that lives in WSL2? That's a ridiculous assumption.

This individual clearly develops and builds with WSL2 and ships to to Ubuntu VMs or as Ubuntu based containers to some orchestration engine.

The point was not that the prod lives in WSL2.

The point was that the development and deployment environment are vastly different.

Developing with different environment than prod is difficult; missing service management layer is a huge difference. WSL2 is optimized to show the shell quickly, but in the background, quite a lot is missing.