For better or for worse, I'm not sure the aggregate direction Microsoft takes as a company is either altruistic or malicious, I'm pretty sure it's ultimately profit driven.

I expect there are MS engineers who see this as altruistic and executives that see this as a way to keep developers from moving off Windows and ultimately as customers. In the end, I'm not sure what this will mean for "desktop Linux". I've already had one colleague dump "bare metal Linux" in favor of Win10 + WSL2.