The copyright holder can license a work under any license at any time. Although you can obviously issue an exclusive license for example, in most countries you can not simply dissolve the copyright (there is no concept of assigning something to the public domain). So practically, there is no way to write a license that stops the copyright holder from issuing a new and different license.

What the GPL does is forbid anyone who is not the copyright holder from changing the license. If you make a derived work from something and wish to use the GPL as the means for allowing you to make that derived work, then you must use the GPL.

The "better terms" that more permissive licenses give you is the ability to change the license when you make a derived work. Of course someone can fork the original open source version, but this is only useful if that person: 1) knows about it 2) has access to it 3) can build and install it for their platform. In many cases, more permissive licenses are preferred because vendors know that they can provide digital locks on the platforms that stop people from deploying free (as in freedom) versions. They wish to get the benefit of open source development, but still lock their users out of certain functionality.

Permissive licenses are useful, but they are not automatically better for everyone in every circumstance. Certainly I have a lot of useless bricks that used to be useful consumer electronics because my vendor doesn't let me upgrade them. Strangely the best piece of consumer hardware I ever bought was a bicycle navigation unit from Sony. GPL from top to bottom and they even gave you instructions on how to rebuild it and deploy it.

Does it matter? It certainly does to me. YMMV.