I'd bet it was network access. It's a bizarre and common problem (I see more people commenting on the issues all the time) which you can kind of fix by forcing 8.8.8.8 or a different nameserver into /etc/resolv.conf but it's unclear to me why this doesn't work out of the box.

yes that was 100% it! I use WSL to do web dev in a windows machine so I can use all my favourite tools. So no WSL2 for me (though that work around is worth a shot).