It's a good thing to point out that judges are notoriously indifferent about "he said that she said" type arguments. In the presence of anything that looks like a license text or contract that's usually what they take as the starting point for a decision. In so far that is enforcable of course. Most longer licenses usually have some language stating what happens when certain things aren't enforcable.

With GPL, the version matters. I'm not aware of any GPL v1 licensed stuff, it probably was a bit short lived. But there's quite a few things licensed under GPLv2 and GPLv3. v3 tried to close a few loopholes v2 had that some companies working with e.g. Linux or Java see as a feature rather than a bug.

Many corporate lawyers don't like GPL style licenses and particularly AGPL because these licenses have a lot of things to say about things like intellectual property, patents, servers, and uses that are/aren't allowed that probably isn't OK with most corporate lawyers worth their money. With GPLv2, this stuff has been through the courts a few times so the industry seems comfortable with it at this point.

Whether those lawyers are right or not is not something engineers should be overruling based on vague notions of fairness, gut feelings, loose interpretations, etc. The whole "it's fine because we're all nice people" doesn't have much value in a court room. Licenses are for when people stop being nice to each other.

I prefer the MIT license for my own projects. It's simple and clear and completely uncontroversial with corporate lawyers. It has decades of use, is well understood, and has very little ambiguity. Lots of OSS is licensed with it. It's fair for developers and users. Users being able to do what they want with the software is fully intentional on my part. That's a freedom I give them with that license and not something I actively want to restrict. Fully understood and intentional.