It is no excuse, it is literally Richard Stallman's view on the four user freedoms, how to enforce them legally, and naturally all of those that agree with his point of view.
Note that all the hobby stuff I have on Github created by myself, unless forced by existing licenses, are GPL based.
Even though I am not into FOSS politics, I once were, that time is long gone.
My take is that 15 years of booming software market and endless high paying jobs made people indifferent to the way open source software was/is being exploited by tech as a form of unpaid labour, because a) having an open source portfolio ended up being a kind of resume or bragging card that help get you a high paying job and b) the money being spread around was big enough that people didn't really care anyways. Nobody was starving.
I think it's shifting. I think we'll see a return to copyleft licenses as people realize the stuff they're writing that is actually valuable is just a couple commits away from being some new AWS component they will get no compensation for, and that starts to matter a lot more.
20-25-30 years ago we were a lot more aware of this stuff. There's a reason the Linux kernel is GPL.
If corporate entities want your stuff bad enough, they can negotiate a separate license.
AWS can easily comply with the (A)GPL and still not give people any compensation for using their stuff. You have to go to a non-FOSS license if you want anything out of Amazon, but then they probably won't use your stuff anyway, unless it is popular enough that they can make lots more off it than they would have to give to you.
Note that all the hobby stuff I have on Github created by myself, unless forced by existing licenses, are GPL based.
Even though I am not into FOSS politics, I once were, that time is long gone.