millions of people use it. the perennial question is why does the license make people so unreasonably angry?

>there’s a reason corps tend to avoid it

it's the same reason they try to assign IP you dreamt up in the shower to themselves in perpetuity with no exceptions - a combination of corporate greed, hubris and lawyerly risk aversion.

People tend not to like it because it’s restrictive to the point of being off limits in many real world use cases. Bob works on the platform team at at GigaCorp. He’s overworked, and found a great OSS product that does exactly what he needs and could save him weeks or months of effort. Except because it’s GPL, he can’t touch it.

so it's worth the time, and thus money to pay. Therefore, if he's got a brain, he would ask for corporate money to buy a commercial license, and do away with the risks of GPL.

Except he doesn't, because the corp (or he himself) believes that it should be free somehow?

Bob could just whine at the developer, of course, for not making his day at a well paid job slightly easier.

But the only reason for such anti-GPL policies is so that the corporations can ensure their software remains proprietary, which is inherently wrong.