I dont know. When I first heard about their game, I expected a neat pirate ship combat sandbox game, but instead it turned out to be a lame ass arcade shooter.
I dont recall seeing anyone happy about this, outside white knights on reddit.
It seems like there are a lot of niche game concepts and genres that are falling to the wayside as the major devs and publishers are more interested in dumbing things down for a larger, more casual (or in some cases more competitive audience). Hell Civ7 is sitting at mostly negative recent reviews after pulling that shit.
A mirror of WSL is WINE, and we know that WINE is Not an Emulator ;)
But, yeah, jokes aside - it depends on the definition.
Still, the translation (or emulation) layer is partial at best. No cgroups (so no native Docker and rkt would work only with fly stage1 and a few patches), sockets are limited (e.g. a number of setsockopt stuff is missing), no tun or tap devices, no netfilter subsystem at all (so no iptables/iproute2/nftables), no GPU access, etc etc etc. Even though it's out of beta it's a bit early to think of it as a "real deal". Best it can do is run some desktop apps and build some software. Would probably work for basic webdev stuff (without containerization), but that's about it. It would probably never come close to the real thing, just as WINE probably won't ever replace Windows. But they try.
The dependency to make this work is transforming the calls but the Ubuntu itself is not. Not everything has to run through that translation layer either, only specific types of calls to make things work. Code that isn't using specific *nix commands will run like normal without that layer.
It's pretty complex. I don't think I would call it an emulator but I can see why someone would.