Ultimately Free Software and Open Source mean the same thing. They come from philosophically different viewpoints that they emphasize - free software tries to emphasize on freedom, while open source is more a technical approach and often comes from more business oriented people.
But in terms of what licenses actually qualify as either Open Source or Free Software - they don't differ. And the GPL absolutely is an Open Source license. The organization that made the term Open Source popular agrees: https://opensource.org/licenses/gpl-license
To reference the original point, Business may be allergic to the GPL, but at the same love the wider set of Open Source licenses.
Free Software, and Open Source very much do not mean the same thing. Free Software is a subset of open source with an addional layer of very restrictive clauses. It is that extra layer that prevents GPL code being used by most business.
While the difference is based in philosophy, yes, that philisophical difference has a huge impact in how code is used in the real world.
Free Software Foundation disagrees with this view: https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.en.html
Perhaps the difference is most noticeable in libraries (where I do most of my work). Using a GPL library in a commercial app is generally impossible, where BSD (or LGPL) etc is completely acceptable.
In my experience companies are allergic to GPL specifically, whereas other licenses - especially MIT and BSD are far more palatable, and are frequently used.
While orthogonal to your main point, this sentence conflates Free Software (GPL) with Open Source. It should be emphasised that the GPL is NOT open source, and that Open Source is not Free Software.
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point....