Are you sshing into the wsl instances or he windows host? Pretty much all my interactions with wsl is using the wsl cli. Other than the very initial step of enabling wsl, mostly because I never memorized the powershell enable command.

I ssh directly into WSL but for setting it up (auto-start, recovery, etc.) I ssh into PowerShell (which I hate). A TUI would go a long way there because no one wants to learn PowerShell.

You can use wsl.exe from powershell to manage wsl.

FWIW I started reverse engineering the WSL2 API -- it's not terribly complicated to do most tasks without the CLI (which is clunky IMO, as it had a number of times where it changed in backwards/forwards incompatible ways)

https://crates.io/crates/wsl-api