That said, what I had in mind when I licensed my code were start-ups and small+medium businesses. It didn't occur to me that behemoths like Amazon might stripmine open source and fail to contribute back. Even though the permissive licenses permit this kind of behavior, it seems exploitative.
Additionally, as the GP mentions, we're at the point where it's primarily massive tech companies who can afford to develop ambitious open source projects.
Far more importantly, it also failed to occur to me that tech companies would become the new railroads -- massive monopolies that dominate society, the economy, culture, politics, etc. When I started in open source, Microsoft had recently been slapped down by antitrust regulators, there was no social media, and the tech ecosystem - particularly the open source ecosystem - was much, much different. It was more democratic, egalitarian, and balanced.
Granted, as far as I know, it has been small and medium sized companies that have used my own open source code. I'm not aware of any of the Big 5 using it (my most popular libaries have been superceded by newer/better projects anyway).
Nonetheless, I would have been more wary of philosophically supporting permissive licenses had I fully realized the implications.
These are social and political problems, you can't fix them by sitting in your basement writing copyleft code anymore than you fix them by writing permissively licensed code.
It's not like the FAANG's of the world would go, oh no we really want to use this copyleft library, oh well, let's release all our code under a copyleft license as well. They'd just use some other code with a more permissive license, or then they would reimplement the needed functionality themselves.
This is true. But just because you can't fix something by yourself, doesn't mean that you should contribute to, or participate in, the problem.