If so many developers manage to get stuff done on Windows, students can do it, too. This post feels like it's 10 years old, when there was no Visual Studio Code, Windows Terminal, or WSL.
Visual Studio Code, Windows Terminal and WSL are hot garbage, which I wouldn't want students to get anywhere close to. Why does it matter that they exist?
The point of education is to understand how to do something. An editor that uses Electron is a massively complicated system that's impossible to comprehend. And so is a virtualized operating system. You would have to twist yourself into knots trying to explain the reason behind terminal existence and function, if all you have is Windows -- all because that system ultimately doesn't need one, it's contrary to how everything works there.
More so, all these tools were developed by Microsoft because they wanted to get developers' allegiance by feeding them with superficial fakes, by doing market research and implementing the most "liked" features -- not unlike the spirit of other Microsoft products. And, like with other Microsoft products they've created an ice-cream miso soup with churros and peanut butter. The tools are pathetically bad, but they've managed to convince a lot of developers they are good by specifically checking the checkbox they've complained about. A reverse malicious compliance of sorts.
About 10 years ago (funny that you mentioned that era earlier), before WSL, I was using Sublime Text, mintty and MinGW.
I even had a project to auto-spin a unix-like shell for windows: http://github.com/alganet/shunt (doesn't work anymore since ms crippled wscript).
VSCode is just another bloated Sublime Text clone. Language servers are a fine addition and I respect them, but pretty much everything else is a ms-branded copy. It's good, and I like it, but considering what it could be it kinda sucks too.
