Why would a studio care about this? A tech firm would certainly care, but the entertainment industry? They probably don't know what GPL is and would probably just associate it with "free"
Even if it's just for internal consumption, legal likes to know what's going on and where it might impact them later.
However, the GPL and other copyleft software will not for the most part have much of an effect on studios unless they sharing some of their IP they've created with the broader community, partners, and/or proprietary software vendors.
A friend worked at a company where they banned GIMP as they feared that editing logos and other trademarks in it could invalidate them.
Even working for a tech company, I don't think I would suggest using anything GPL as it would cause a fuss.
If you're a senior enough manager and have a legitimate business reason then you can often push back enough and get them to give in, but it's really a question of whether it's worth your time and effort internally.
Given that, I'm not surprised that the (not-always-technical) lawyers are worried about GPL.
"even" Ubuntu? Are you implying that Canonical are some kind of champion of free software?
Expecting an entertainment industry org (which were specially attacked in latest version of GPL around DRM) to be comfortable seems far fetched.
Of course it's even more silly when you consider that you're never going to be making patches to Maya, so in theory nothing is lost on the Blender side here.
Quite a few have released commercial software, share proprietary software with partner/vendor companies , or contribute to OSS.
As with any tech company, the GPL is a very unwelcome license for fear of how far reaching it can be.