I feel like there could be little need for rules if people had a little common sense, then if you have targets, other start doing the bare minimum, I'd rather have parasites like WPEngine put off
Either you are a free license or not.
If people want to do that, then fair enough, just don't call if free or open source. And don't license your code under free or open source licenses if you care about getting credit or compensation or anything but maximizing software freedom.
In doubt, you will have to enforce the freedoms of FOSS by going to a court (i.e. use the governmental "violence enforcement system"). On the other hand, if you pay your taxes "voluntarily", you won't be coerced by the government.
In other words: in both cases threats of violence are involved.
What people call things is a marketing phenomenon. You can complain all you want.. and you should.
It’s not possible for GPL projects to restrict the code this way, but the peripheral assets like trademarks, servers, conference slots, board seats, core contributor status could be restricted.
If I scrape some website, I could be IP banned at any time. That's just how it goes.
It's one thing to use web resources on a small scale, as a user. It's another to milk them dry and practically DDOS their servers. That can, and will, get you banned. Open source or not.
> wordpress.org update servers. Nothing about "practically DDOS" of the server
Yes, when you have hundreds of thousands of users this is expensive. What you're describing is expensive.
WPE doesn't maintain these servers, presumably because it's hard and expensive. You can't expect to hit someone's servers with, I'm guessing, hundreds of thousands of requests a day and not pay a dime. If you did that, you would be banned. From just about any free service.
How is WPEngine a parasite? If you don't want people to use your code don't release it GPL
GPL-2 doesn't force you to allow free access to web resources. This is a separate problem altogether. You'd get banned even if they were closed source.