I'm using Phoenix for my side project on a Windows machine. It hasn't been too problematic for me. Maybe something changed since you've tried it.

There used to be a couple pain points when working with Phoenix on Windows. The bcrypt library wouldn't build, something needed to be run in Administrator mode to establish their symlink workaround, and PostgreSQL is a little more irritable on Windows. SASS (some node dependency in the Javascript asset managing stuff) also flat out didn't work on windows, but there was a drop-in replacement.

I know the SASS issue was solved (as a side effect of eliminating the node dependency), and I believe the bcrypt issue was, too.

What is "classless CSS"? Just using style attributes?

Probably just a css file that styles the html elements only without using any classes

No style attributes. You just use HTML markup and use a classless CSS framework to take care of making it look nice. My favorite is Marx, but there are others you can find here: https://github.com/dbohdan/classless-css

Water.css, MVP.css, sakura, and Tacit are among the most popular.

I've always liked Pico myself.

Use virtuabox and make a vm with ubuntu, install elixir and connect via ssh. This is what I did when I wanted to try it out but only had win8

In my opinion, this is just too much effort these days.

WSL2 should get you going?

That's what I would suggest as well. WSL2 and use asdf[1] to manage the erlang/elixir versions.

You could also use containers pretty easily as well with docker or podman for windows and the official Elixir images[2].

[1]: https://github.com/asdf-vm/asdf

[2]: https://hub.docker.com/_/elixir

WSL2, while amazing technology, is a resource hog and still a bit buggy in my experience. I use it w/ linux from time to time when I don't have a choice, but when I'm coding, it just feels like a hyper-bloated IDE.