I do not understand fully how might the operating system have anything to do with something deployed on the web if you are not hosting the site locally.
Also, if I do not have a Linux machine, can I replace it by running WSL on my Windows PC? Or are there some fatal drawbacks that might point to not doing that?
PHP can be installed and run on Windows and MacOS as well as Linux and others - see https://www.php.net/manual/en/install.php for details.
Having said that, if you're planning to host the live site on a remote webserver which runs Linux, then developing that site on a machine which runs a similar operating system is likely to result in fewer unexpected compatibility issues when you deploy it to the live server. There are ways you can write the code in a cross-platform way (and 90+% of it isn't an issue anyway, there are just a few sticky areas mainly around files and paths etc), but there's always the danger of missing something.
If you prefer to develop mainly on Windows you could mitigate the above by having a virtual machine, or container, or by using WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux), where you run tests against the site in a comparable environment to its live environment before deploying it to live. There are other resources already available such as this online which discuss the specifics of using PHP with WSL, if you want to pursue that.