You needed Powershell for Headless, SSH and Terminal to make sense. WSL required mindset shift at Microsoft.

Not really. More command-line admin programs and traditional shells like yori or bash would have been fine. Good enough for every other Network OS to date. Netware had great TUIs.

NT also had OS/2 and Posix subsystems ((checks calendar)) about thirty years ago, now that I think of it.