Great question — answering as the UphillTech team:
The rm -rf command operates directly in the Linux virtual machine in which the filesystem is defined, on files defined within that virtual machine. The Windows explorer operates on a virtual filesystem \\wsl.localhost\ (...) that effectively translates all Windows operations on that filesystem to the corresponding operations on the actual filesystem defined within the virtual machine. This translation is slow. It cannot translate the "remove this while directory tree" operation as one single operation, because filesystems do not have such an operation. Instead, Explorer traverses the directory tree and deletes each file it finds; each of these deletions is translated to the corresponding...
Full answer by reinierpost: https://superuser.stackexchange.com/a/1940844 (CC BY-SA 4.0).
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