I work in Vim and tmux in WSL all the time and it works great for me. In fact, the only tool I've found that doesn't work (on the latest slow ring) is vim-plug.

> having serve operations spit out the server into the actual Windows browser?

I'm unsure exactly what you mean. But you can absolutely run web servers in WSL and connect to them from any browser running on Windows.

In my experience, you can connect to any network services running on Windows from Linux (for example, I connect to the Docker for Windows daemon) and vice versa.