So I'm going to break down the problem I had and the solution, which is embarrassingly simple.
When I first started I walked through laravel's instructions. I downloaded docker desktop, installed a linux OS (Ubuntu to be specific) and configured the WSL on docker. Then I missed this really important line "begin a new terminal session for your WSL2 Linux operating system" and went straight to trying to run curl -s https://laravel.build/example-app | bash which didn't work and gave the issues above.
I figured that maybe I needed to be in the linux os and tried to run the commands there but got 'docker not found'. I went through the WSL stuff again to make sure it was all set up fine, as far as I could tell it was fine.
Once I found out I missed that one line I knew I was on the right track but nothing was working, everything was set fine, WSL was on 2, there was no reason for all of this to have such issues. I finally restarted my computer and brought everything back up and it's now working fine and installing Laravel on the linux os.
tl:dr
I didn't begin a new terminal session with WSL2 Linux OS and once I realized my mistake it took a restart of my computer to fix the final issues.