If git didn't have this setting, then after checking out a bash file with LFs in it, there are many Windows editors that would not be able to edit that file properly. That's a limitation of those editors & nobody should be using those pieces of software to edit bash files. This is a problem that is entirely out of scope for a VCS & not something Git should ever have tried to solve.
In fact, having git solve this disincentives Windows editors from solving it correctly.
You will have the same problem if you build a Linux container image using scripts that were checked out on the windows host machine. What's even more devious is that some editors (at least VS Code) will automatically save .sh files with LF line endings on Windows, so the problem doesn't appear for the original author, only someone who clones the repo later. I spent probably half a day troubleshooting this a while back. IMO it's not the fault of any one tool, it's just a thing that most people will never think about until it bites them.
TL;DR - if your repo will contain bash scripts, use .gitattributes to make sure they have LF line endings.
Also the full story here seemed to be
1. Person installs git on Windows with autocrlf enabled, automatically converting all LF to CRLF (very cursed in itself in my opinion).
2. Does their thing with git on the Windows' side (clone, checkout, whatever).
3. Then runs the checked out (and now broken due to autocrlf) code on Linux instead of Windows via WSL.
The biggest footgun here is autocrlf but I don't see how this is whole situation is the problem of any Linux tooling.