I release the code so that people and companies that feel like contributing to the community can use it. Companies that want to take without giving back however are mildly inconvenienced by copyleft.
> I chose to do it for free to help other people. And picking a MIT license does the opposite.
I have no idea what this is supposed to mean. I want to help other people, then giving them the means to do what they want with no real restrictions is "the opposite" of that?
> Companies that want to take without giving back
So this is not about helping anyone else, but about mandating a behavior, even if that behavior is "pay it forward".
I used to work for a very open source-friendly company and, while AGPL wasn't broadly verbotten and I can't quote any publicly available documents, its use was not encouraged in general. (And outside of Linux which was what it was, permissive licenses became much more common for new projects.)