How long ago did you try it? I gave the first iteration of wsl a chance and had the same experience, it was super slow especially for things like ls. Its a lot better since wsl2. Probably 90% or more the performance of bare metal install of linux
I used it last year on Windows 10 (I was forced to use Windows by my employer). I didn't use it with WSL, just with Git Bash.
Also forced to use windows for work. That wasn't the windows terminal program being slow, that was git bash.