Of all the things that constitute a value ad that might allow Oracle or any other company to sell a premium operating system and do away with reciprocal licensing, the core utilities aren’t it. There are already permissively, licensed versions of most of those tools. If people want to champion the GPL and so forth, this is not the hill to die on it’s not really even a hill. It’s a mole hill. That’s not to say that I undervalue the worth of these utilities, but they are not something that people are going to pay premium prices for.

You don’t need to imagine. Apple ships macOS with a BSD user space. The sky has not fallen.

If Linux was the way macOS is, nobody would use it. They'd use macOS, to Apple's great benefit.

I genuinely don't follow your point.

I already prefer macOS over Linux for my desktop, to Apple’s great benefit

There's nothing stopping Oracle from selling us Oracle Linux for a nice subscription price either. The GPL is explicitly not meant to prevent commercialisation of software.