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Ultimately the GPL is about protecting users' rights at the expense of developers' rights.No. The GPL is about giving developers and users the same rights. Some developers want more rights than users, and engage in special pleading to call that "fairness".
> So as long as AWS can offer a better/cheaper managed version of a software service, while still giving the users all details on how to run the same service if they chose to, then the AGPL is completely achieving its aims, even if the original company goes out of business.
The truth many developers don't want to face is that, if you write a program or tool that can be easily deployed by the behemoths of tech on infrastructure and at scale you cannot match, then you do not have a licensing problem... You have an architecture problem.
A company big enough to take your code and deploy it at overmatched scale and efficiency is also big enough to study your publicly accessible code, however it is licensed, and write new code that achieves the same outcome, maybe even implements nearly the same API, and then deploy that at scale. Actually competing with them involves pursuing fundamentally different architectures and value propositions which they cannot imitate, not writing some new license and trying to pitch it to customers/clients as "fair".
The above reverse engineering and reimplementation already happen in the other direction (e.g. Docker vs. Podman). There's no reason to think a motivated behemoth couldn't do exactly the same to your "fair" source software. On the other hand, Google is constitutionally unable to ever make or deploy at scale something like, for example, Ente Photos, because Google desparately wants all the photos people upload to be legible to Google forever and for whatever new purposes Google's executives might dream up in the future.