Yes, it's a thing but how often is it actually done? I can imagine circumstances where a company might do so--say a cloud provider wants to clone some open source software and offer it as a service. But I'm pretty sure the practice isn't routine.

Not really a fix to the problem since as your own link shows you can still be dragged into court to defend against a copyright lawsuit which can cost someone tens if not hundreds of thousands of dollars and there are no guarantees when you're up against a team of lawyers representing an entity with far more money and resources than you have. In the end, you can do everything right and still easily end up being screwed which isn't how anything should work.